[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Yes, it does make things difficult
They say its for security since most of the sites are all hosted on one machine, and one apache instance. Perhaps the shebang and extensions were default requirements, and they never bothered (or knew how) to change them.
I will give that AddHandler a try, although I have found that they (university server admins) have greatly limited what I can do in my htacess file.
Anything else I should be aware of? They do have a site that uses drupal (which "requires?" php to be installed as module), so hopefully I can get CI going.
Thanks for the help!