I was just thinking even if it wasn't online in the going live sense, maybe it was somewhere we could poke and prod at it in the test sense. Generally speaking if you have a rewrite rule in your .htaccess and you're not getting a 500, then mod_rewrite is enabled and working. I was thinking it might be one of those times we're both missing something simple... Is the full URL on your test something like; http://localhost/moreinfo.php?p=22 ?
-m