Has anyone had success getting the Search Engine Friendly URLs to work?

If I turn the 0 to a 1 in the constant file, and activate the htaccess while I have a forum setup it just endlessly refreshes until my browser stops it.

If I turn the 0 to 1 and activate the htaccess before I do the forum installation setup, the installation setup doesn't work (says it can't find any of the files.)

I've tried messing with as many settings as possible and have done multiple clean installs and have not been able to get it to work.

Thanks.

Problem solved.

Got it working by doing a completely fresh installation, and then immediately afterwards turning on SEF before loading my custom theme.