Whilst trying to install a piece of software on a GoDaddy hosted account I noticed that mod_rewrite variables were simply not being passed to the correct pages. When digging a bit deeper I found that it was effectively ignoring extensions in URLs and just displaying the file with the extension. i.e. instead of having to enter:

www.example.com/advertise.php

you could instead type

www.example.com/advertise

And it would return the same file, which is good if for some unknown reason your file doesn’t have the correct extension, but its not exactly.. good..

After trawling Google for a while I found a post by Eric Faerber that solved the problem. The strange redirects were due to Apache MultiViews being enabled, disabling this by entering

Options -MultiViews

into the .htaccess file. Solved the problem, the simplest solutions are always the best!