I ended up changing to a linux host, IIS and joomla haven't quite got it together yet especially with that rewrite stuff. Its Joomla and IIS that is the problem, not sure its right to blame ACESEF

My complaint with AceSEF is only that they could have saved me (and, I'm sure, others in similar situations) a lot of time and irritation by making it clear up front that (at least probably) AceSEF will not work at all in environments that fail with .htaccess present. And saying things like "disabling the Apache mod-rewrite does not disable AceSEF" when the product manifestly does *not* function without mod_rewrite enabled is not at all helpful.

I fully agree that IIS/Windows is a pain-in-the-neck environment, particularly for Joomla. Know of anyone who offers cheap, good Cold Fusion hostng under Linux? (HostingAtoZ has been good to me in every other way, but for some reason their Linux hosting doesn't include Cold Fusion support - so as long as I'm there, I'm stuck with Windows.)

Denis wrote:

> Then I would advice you to not use any SEF component, it'll give you a headache with IIS on shared hosting enviroment.


Actually, sh404SEF runs happily enough under Windows/IIS; it doesn't get rid of index.php as part of my site's URL's, but it functions nicely otherwise. (I can't compare it to AceSEF, since I never got to see the latter in operation on my site.) It's worth noting that sh404SEF doesn't guarantee that it works in the Windows/IIS environment, but I did get good support from them to get things going.