Possible reasons for not getting permalink htaccess to work?

[Bill]

I was working on another blog on another server, trying to set up it's permalinks as I did recently with a blog, but on this server I cannot get the permalinks to work.

I upload an htaccess in ascii, chmod it to 777 to let wordpress write to it, and in options/permalinks experiment with variations of /%postname%.html. (including /index.php/%postname%.html, in the unlikely event that mod_rewrite is not installed)

But all I am getting is 404s. page not found.

It looks like wordpress is writing to the htaccess sucessfully, all the expected stuff is there. But it's not working.

Anybody have any suggestions on how to get it to work?