Apache, MySQL and 403 errors

I've been trying to run mediawiki on my local computer for a while now, in preparation for putting it live on the internet. Following the instructions at meta.wikimedia.org, I've been trying to use .htaccess to have nice urls like localhost/Main_Page instead of localhost/w/index.php?title=Main_Page or whatever.

I've finally got it to work--sort of. If I try to go to a page with a colon in the title, Apache throws a 403 Forbidden error. That means that the Special: pages, User: pages, and all those, are all inaccessible.

After a bit of research I've discovered that Apache doesn't like colons in URLs because that's the symbol used to specify the drive. I'd like to know if you think there's a way to get around it. After all, Wikipedia does it.

My .htaccess looks like this:
Code: 
# first, enable the processing - Unless your ISP has it enabled
# already.  That might cause weird errors.
RewriteEngine on

# prevent it from looping endlessly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/favicon.ico
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/robots.txt
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/w/(stylesheets|images|skins)/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/w/(redirect|texvc|index).php
# do the rewrite
RewriteRule ^/?(.*)$ /w/index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]
I'm running xampp with Apache 2.0.54 and PHP 4.3.10.


Also, I've been getting some weird error messages in the Apache error log. They look like so:
Code: 
File 'c:\mysql\share\charsets\?.conf' not found (Errcode: 2)
Character set '#48' is not a compiled character set and is not specified in the 'c:\mysql\share\charsets\Index' file
(that's two different errors there)
This is with MySQL version 4.1.12


Any ideas?

 

 

 

 

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