Hi,
I saw this post a while ago and I don't know why you asked but I am fairly new with this and wanted to wait until I had some experience with the system. I am using it without permalinks because I had to migrate from another system and the site already had many rewrites and with osclass, when permalinks are enabled it is hard or not possible to do other rewrite stuff - with my experience, anyway.
With rewrite enabled, it has limited rewrite capabiliites such as the way it shows region links, etc., but if one is starting a new website, permalinks may be the way to go.
Also, if I want to do a rewrite to any search page related query (with permalinks disabled), the rewritten url redirects to the page but does not show in the browser bar but it shows search.cgi in the browser bar. For example, if I want to rewrite a rule like:
Rewriterule ^myads/search-(.*)$ /myads/index.php?page=search&sPattern=$1
it works fine but in the browser bar it shows
http://site.com/myads/index.php?page=search&sPattern=myquery but instead I want it show
http://site.com/search-myquery and I tried many ways. So, if you or anyone have any idea how to do what I want so the rewrite url stays in the browser bar, then appreciate a reply.
Thanks!