hi again,
yes, SEF was already turned on. I found it as 'System-SEF' in Plugin Manager and it was public access level.
But this is what I decided to do. Firstly I changed the access level to 'Special'. I tried again but to no avail.
Same with 'registered' level.
At the global configuration level, and at the SEO Settings box, I also changed to 'Search Engine Friendly URLs' from no to yes,
and likewise 'Use Apache mod_rewrite' to yes and of course renamed the htaccess.txt to .htaccess.
Unfortunately all did not work.
Please advise is there anything else I need installed or turned on.
Thank you kindly once again,
yours sincerely,
Rajan