Please help solving PERMALINK issue!

Hi there,
I have been going through almost all permalink related posts across various forums. However I have not been able to resolve my problem nor to nail it down somehow.

I am running WordPress 2.0. Updating has been a charm. Permalinks for me never worked. Not under 1.5.2 nor under 2.0.

Here are some steps I have undertaken:

– I have a .htaccess file.
– The file can be edited programmatically (permissions). If I add rules maunally via the admin panel’s file editor, they are successfully saved end executed.
– If I add rewrite rules to .htaccess manually, they work. This is a clear sign than mod_rewrite works fine on my server.

However, if I activate permalinks, nothing is added to the .hatccess file. The links in my blog are updates (so they point to ../archives/1, ../archives/2 etc.) but if I click them they lead to nowhere.

So basically the main issue seems to be that WordPress does *not* update the .htaccess file and does *not* add any rules to it.

Can anybody help tracking this down?

Regards
Ralf