Re: “pretty” permalinks in bbPress
There is no restart required for modifying an .htaccess file: Apache reads that for every access.
The permalinks are not related to PHP4 vs PHP5.
The permalink stuff is definitely 100% right now, at least for the 0.9.x series.
I’m assuming you made the change in the admin to turn on the permalinks, in conjunction with adding the .htaccess rewrite rules?
I had to insert this into my .htaccess to turn OFF the multiviews before the rewrite rules would work:
Options -MultiViews