If your htaccess files get routed through the same make-it-pretty converter as your Forums posts, the explanation may be beyond human aid. (Need I say that I just checked out of curiosity before realizing it could be relevant? What you're seeing is an auto-conversion from "f,i" as separate letters to the "fi" ligature-- further converted by the Forums to decimal entity 64257 = hex fb01. Well, I assume you didn't deliberately type it that way.)

The thread title raises a whole nother issue that isn't mentioned in the body of the post. Are you doing this locally or on your real site? If local, do you have the fancy version of WAMP that comes complete with a pseudo-DNS?

Uhm. I'm just making up that last part. I've got the "vanilla" version of MAMP, which only lets you do one domain at a time.

If only there were some middle ground between Not Enough Information and dumping out the entire htaccess (or stylesheet, or ...)