I was the anonymous monk before (forgot to login).

I'm not sure why you'd want to put a 'redirect' into your apache config for.. explicetely linking href's to the base URL ( forward slashes before links e.g. href="/images/somegif.jpg") will solve your problem..

You say you've tried all manner of slashes in your links, can you show me what's *not* working?

the leading forward slash should work for all html/image/css references, but maybe not for SSI's (i don't use SSI's so i'm not sure how it'd react)..