activeco - 5:40 pm on May 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

But setting up a default root file, of, say, index.html, continuing to link to it and excluding it in robots.txt, IMO, is going to continue to split your PageRank and isn't going to cure your display problem...

No, index.html (or any other DirectoryIndex file) is transparent to robots and is associated with root directory. All refering links are still pointing to /. To escape duplicate content issue, straight access to the real file, in this case index.html, is disallowed in robots.txt.