that seems to be working well. thanks a lot for your help.

thanks, that was quick!
A couple of questions before i go ahead and implement it:

will this rule re-direct all index.html(s) to their appropriate roots or will it work just for the home page?
Also, as far as user's expirience is concerned this will take care of redirecting requests to show index.html to the root, but what about the juice transfer. Will Google treat it as 301?

Hi, I was wondering if there is a safe way to consolidate link juice on a single version of a home page. I find incoming links to my site that link to both mysite.com/ and mysite.com/index.html. I've decided to go with mysite.com/ as my main and only URL for the site and now I'd like to transfer all link juice from mysite.com/index.html to mysite.com/
When i tried 301 redirect from index.html to the root it created an indefinite loop, of course.

I know I can use a RewriteRule.., but will it transfer the juice??

Please help!