I have a question. I have tinkered with it a bit but have not been able to come up with a working solution.

I am trying to protect a site with a username and password using basic authentication with a .htaccess file

example domain.com

but under this domain there is a directory that I do wish to make public without authentication.

example domain.com/server_downloads

I'm tried setting a AllowOveride to none for this directory but it still takes the parent directories directive to authenticate.

Any input is very much appreciated.

Thank you

Not sure if this will help:
http://www.htaccesstools.com/htaccess-authentication/

Or try this tut:
http://www.technotrade.com/htaccess.html

Add the following to that .htaccess for that directory

Allow from all
Satisfy Any