in reply to index.cgi or index.html

Not sure what the problem is either, but if you want a plain-old index.html in your webservers document-root and use a .cgi at the same time to do all your processing, you could use a very simple index.html that redirects to your .cgi. Something like this:
 <html>
  <head>
   <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/your-script-here.cgi" />
  </head>
 </html>