Crawl error on non-existent link

WMT finds links to index.html

[RibaRiva]

Suddenly WMT has revealed about a hundred interior and exterior links pointing to example.com/index.html. My homepage is index.htm but throughout my site I link to example.com. When I go to the page where the backlinks are, I can only see a link to example.com. The reported links are unfindable on my site and on the exterior pages. I'm highly confused. Should I 301 both index.htm and index.html to resolve to the root? Or what?

[phranque]

test your response for the request of example.com/ first.
and yes the index document requests should be 301 redirected to the root and then use the server config to specify the default directory document.

[RibaRiva]

example.com/ resolved to example.com. I shall redirect as you suggested but remain perplexed about this sort of error cropping up in WMT. A bug, perhaps.

Thanks

[phranque]

GWT doesn't report all discovered inbound links.
try Y! siteexplorer.

[RibaRiva]

I know that WMT doesn't report all links. What I don't understand is why it's reporting links that do not and never have existed on the linking page.

[phranque]

sorry i didn't reread your OP before responding.
have you looked for clues in your server access logs?