From tutorials on Apache's mod rewrite I see they give examples like this:

RewriteRule ^htax/star/(.*)/(.*).php /htax/star.php?req=tutorial&tut_id=$1&page=$2


And when I try it it does successfully get to the /htax/star.php page, but I encounter 3 problems not mentioned in said tutorials.

1. No $_GET variables are set, no query string is present, this part : "?req=tutorial&tut_id=$1&page=$2" is basically useless.

2. The browser can't find images, css files, etc. since the path is now in a fake directory.

3.further links and such will have the problem mentioned above.

I know I can work around these problems by changing paths and breaking apart urls but I'm wondering if there is another commonly used solution? Possibly my Apache settings should be changed? Using apache on windows, tried Options +followsymlinks

Try changing your rule to:

RewriteRule ^htax/star/(.*)/(.*)\.php$ /htax/star.php?req=tutorial&tut_id=$1&page=$2

Notice the \ before the .php and the $ after it.

Also, to fix the image & link paths you can try adding the base tag to the top of your page:

<base href="http://www.site.com/path/to/folder">