CodeIgniter 1.7.2 + XAMPP 1.7.3 + .htacess problems

[eluser]nickstaroba[/eluser]
I've started from a fresh install of both XAMPP and CI.

CI is installed directly into htdocs and CI's index.php is located there. The config.php has been set up with these changes:

Code:

$config['base_url']    = "http://localhost/";
$config['index_page'] = "";

All else in config.php is default.

I have created the blog.php file as described here:
http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-gui...llers.html

http://localhost/ shows the welcome page.
http://localhost/index.php/blog shows "Hello World!"

XAMPP's httpd.conf file has been modified so that all instances of AllowOverride are set to:

Code:

AllowOverride all

This line was already uncommented so it should be active:

Code:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

I've created a .htaccess file with the following code from
http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-gui.../urls.html

Code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

This file has been placed in htdocs as well as the system folder and I have restarted Apache and even rebooted my PC (*irishAccent "did you try turning it off and on again?"). But still show a 404 error when accessing http://localhost/blog/.

I have tried many other various configurations that I have seen around this site and others to no avail. My copy-paste monkeying around has not solved this problem.

Assistance would be greatly appreciated as well as any references to study.

Thanks!