Rewrite rules totally vexing

Some history:

Originally, I had a website (http://www.godoggoracing.org), and underneath the root directory, I had a wordpress installation at /blog and a gallery installation at /gallery.

Years later, I decided to turn the blog into the home page. I used wpg2 to allow the existing gallery to be viewed within the existing blog.

When I first set this up, I had trouble with the wpg2 functionality. When looking at the gallery the old way (/gallery), the text was too big, but when looking at it through wpg2 (/wpg2), it was too small. And the old gallery rewrite rules for a single image (/gallery/v/....) no longer worked, but they appeared to show up properly at /v (not at /wpg2/v). It's been a long time, but I think I had to hand-edit .htaccess to get everything functional.

But it was basically working.

I have upgraded wordpress a few times since then, but last week, I upgraded to wordpress 2.7. Now I'm back to the frustrating times. The gallery rewrites aren't working at all (404 errors). The text at /wpg2 is very small, and at /gallery, it's very big. I have broken links all over my site due to the failure of /v to work.

I think maybe I lost my hand-edits of .htaccess? I didn't have them saved, seems like something overwrote them.

Am I doing something fundamentally wrong? Or is hand-editing these files par for the course?

Thanks for any help. I would really much prefer to have a standard installation than one which requires a lot of special work each time I upgrade.