>>Found a few things I did wrong - for one, there was no * handler for static files - the above error vanished when I added that... so I got pretty much everything in order now.
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>Are you using Apache? Or IIS? Sounds like Apache. IAC, * handlers should inherit from the root Web site/service so it's odd that that doesn't work.
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>Unfortunately my Apache configuration help is limited to what's being put into the configuration by the auto-configuration tools in Web Connection. Beyond that you're mostly on your own...

Nope, it's IIS 7.5 on W2008R2... anyway, solving problems one by one. Part of the problem was the stuff I screwed up because I was finding articles in the wrong order... so your article with instructions on what are things called in IIS7 which had different names before came last.

The only remaining point of confusion is where does it keep that old index.html - the one on disk isn't in use. I tried turning off the cache, but it seems that the request for turning it off is cached somewhere :).