server 500 with xampp

[eluser]neilw[/eluser]
Hello,
Everything was fine until I moved to xampp, now all I get is errors when I use the .htaccess file, even just having 'rewriteengine on' by itself generates an error. I've checked the forums for similar but not seem to work. mode_rewrite is loaded.

In my original working (pre-xampp) version I simply had this:

Code:

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

Now it produces a server 500.

I followed the wiki (http://codeigniter.com/wiki/mod_rewrite/) and with that, no matter what I type in the url or controller I use, it ignores it and goes to the welcome page. If I click on links from the welcome page, they just get appended too and stay in the welcome page, e.g.
http://localhost.ignite/welcome/game/use...ser_guide/

My original apache used virtual directories, but I also tried using alias, but both have the same results.

I've tried full access, e.g.

Code:

<Directory "c:/documents and settings/803300352/My Documents/DATA/Training/php/ignite_test">
        Options Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

and still the same.

Can anyone help?

Thanks.