I combined the htaccess files (putting the blog rewrite rule to the bottom of the file) now having just one htacess in the root directory and unfortunately it did not work. When I tried it, all the links on the blog would not work, they were all "page not found" so I reverted it back to what I originally had... Here is what the combined htaccess file looked like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.example.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /blog/
 RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php/. [NC]
 RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule>

Thanks again for any insight!

Thanks for your response Keith, I'll give it a try and let you know!

Thanks George.  Please forgive me, I am a newbie at this!  I took a look at the link you provided, and I don't fully understand what they are explaining.  What I did understand is that having 2 htaccess files in different directories caused a problem with their code.  Do you think combining the two files into one on the root directory will make a difference for me?

Thanks Keith.  I tried it and it is still looping.  Do you think it has something to do with having 2 different .htaccess files?  Should I combine them into just one in the root directory?

I've been searching for an answer all day, I can't seem to figure this out.

When I Fetch my blog as Google(http://www.mysite.com/blog) WITHOUT a trailing slash at the end, I get this error:

The page seems to redirect to itself. This may result in an infinite redirect loop

**HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently**

When I Fetch my blog as Google WITH the trailing slash at the end(http://www.mysite.com/blog/), it is fine without errors.

When I pull it up in a browser comes up fine both with and without the trailing slash.

My .htaccess file in the root directory contains this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.htm\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.htm$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

My .htaccess file in the blog directory contains this:

BEGIN WordPress

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
 RewriteBase /blog/
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^./index.php/. [NC]
 RewriteRule ^index.php/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]</ifmodule>

END WordPress

Do I have something incorrectly coded in these .htaccess files that could be causing this? Or is there something else I should look at? Thank you for any help!!