BuddyPress.org

Hi everyone.
I’ve had a lot of trouble recently uploading a new site to a subdomain with buddypress on, so decided to start from fresh on the main domain to see if it can be done!
Anyway after updating permalinks and so on, customising the theme (custom community) and making sure the settings were exactly as they were on the local server (with xampp), I have a mostly functional site.
The only problem is most of the buddypress stuff – the page links to the members section goes to http://www.mysite.com/index.php/members/ instead of just http://www.mysite.com/members and when I click on my own name I get a 404 and same though the admin bar for my single profile. Additionally, all I have at the moment on the activity, forum, group pages (basially all bp pages) are “edit this page” instead of the actual intended content.
I made a post to see if that was why nothing was there yet (in case it needed actual activity for it to work) but that didn’t change anything.
Any hints anyone as to why? and what to do?

I did come across the FAQ – something about the mod rewrite being enabled. Does this sound like it could be that? How does one change that setting?
Thanks for helping a newbie!!