BuddyPress.org

no, I haven’t been near .htaccess at all.

all the other tabs are working fine. The only thing that went different on this install on the live server compared to the local server was that on the live server I had made a change to a home.php file just by way of experimentation when it was just running wpmu, which meant that when i installed bp it didn’t at first display the bp theme properly. But returning the home.php file to its original state fixed that.