I don't know if this will help but here it is. :-)

I'm currently redesigning a page that is a CGI script for the main page. When I talked to my hosting people, I was told that they had it set up to look for index.html first - I assume .htm or .html - then if that wasn't found it looked for index.whatever. This allows people to still do the www.mysite.com and for me to run something like index.cgi. I'm assuming there is soemthing they've configured in Apache - but that's only an assumption.

Hope that steers you in the right direction.

Some people fall from grace. I prefer a running start...