Why would you want to use the same username and passwords for .htaccess? Isn't it better to have a different set of username and passwords in case the database ones gets compromised? That's what I do.

Nope. In several web servers (most commonly Apache), .htaccess (hypertext access) is the default name of a directory-level configuration file that allows for decentralized management of web server configuration.
It works on several webservers so also on Sun Java System Web Server and Zeus Web Server.

So it's not specific an Apache thing but a webserver thing on a *nix (Unix/Linux) environment. And that's the reason it won't work on windows. Otherwise people get confused why it won't work with Apache for windows.

Wow, old thread.

At the time this information was posted it was probably correct.

Closing as this is a 8 year old thread.