Front Page and 301 and/or .htaccess redirects

how to redirect mysite.com and still use FP extensions

[steveb]

Topic seems better suited here now...

I want to redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com

I'm on a non-IP account with a major hosting company, and use FrontPage which is "supported" by the hosting company.

When I try to use a 301 redirect:
redirect 301 /mysite.com/ [mysite.com...]
it does not work, does nothing. When I do:
redirect 301 / [mysite.com...]
I get a 500 error.

My hosting company sent me this .htaccess mod rewrite:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite.com
RewriteRule /(.*) [mysite.com...]

They said it might not work, and it doesn't. I entered this in via my control panel without using Frontpage. This succeeds in only making the banners on my mysite.com page disappear/not found. The mysite.com page continues to appear without the www.

The tech "support" suggested I try something with an index.cgi file, which sounds absurd since I've never seen that mentioned for this piddly little redirection issue.

The other code in my .hataccess file (not including the authentications stuff is:

# -FrontPage-

IndexIgnore .htaccess */.?* *~ *# */HEADER* */README* */_vti*

<Limit GET POST>
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from all
</Limit>
<Limit POST PUT DELETE>
order deny,allow
deny from all
</Limit>

Another suggestion had me try adding to .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.mysite\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [mysite.com...] [R=301,L]

But when I went to use Frontpage I got this error message:

403 Forbidden
Forbidden You don't have permission to access /_vti_bin/shtml.exe/_vti_rpc on this server.

So... any good ideas (besides dumping frontpage) on how to redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com and continuing to use frontpage would be appreciated. Thanks.