Ensuring all links go to index.php

PHP List, This problem is a little hard to describe. Please forgive me in advance if it's not clear. I have set up my .htaccess file to work with my PHP script to create "friendly URLs". For example, the URL mysite.com/user/login will take the user to a page where a user logs in. It does this by stripping everything out except "user" and "login". It takes "user" and creates a "user" object, and then passes a "login" method to that class to take the user to the login page. Somehow, in this process, the local URL is becoming "mysite/user", even though I'm just using that "user" designation to drive the creation of objects from classes. So, for example, I have a link to logout which is simply href="user/logout". But when I mouse over it, and look at the status bar at the bottom of my FireFox browser window, it says that the link points to: mysite.com/user/user/logout That URL, obviously, doesn't work for my system. It tries to make a "User" object and call a "user" method which doesn't exist. So... my question is, why is the /user portion of my URL being retained as a directory? I thought it had something to do with setting headers. I want everything to operate through the index.php file in my root directory, so I thought I could do that by putting this at the top of the index.php page: header("Location: /"); Or: header("/local/server/www/directory/"); Bottom line is, how do I ensure that all links and user requests through the URL end up going to the index.php in my web site's root directory? I hope this question is clear enough, and thank you for any and all advice. -- Dave M G Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Kernel 2.6.17.7 Pentium D Dual Core Processor PHP 5, MySQL 5, Apache 2