.htaccss gone crazy

Here’s the wordpress part of my htaccess
It is a wordpress MU

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteRule ^old-subsite/(.*)$ /television/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^old-subsite-2/(.*)$ /radio/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$/print/ http://www.mydomain.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ – [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]
# END WordPress

So here’s the thing –
On every visit i see in the apache error log that there is an error, something like too many redirects, exceeded limit of 10

if i change those two $2 to $1, the redirect errors stops, and the home page loads – but other things break, like the subsites’ css and scripts won’t load. i dodn’t even explore farther to see what else might be messed up,

is there something wrong with my htaccess?

i don’t have the main site in a sub-directory if that matters.