Hi there
I believe my order is ID: 9470421
now i have found this one 16866 and not sure which one is the id you require?

I run Joomla 1.5.22 stable and installed SEF 3.8.1 about 2 weeks ago.
i appreciate a number of older entries cover this well hashed problem, but I am unsure where to go in my instance. I installed JoomSEF ArtIO (paid) a short while back and received those errors etc. In meantime I have had to create my .htaccess file and i believe all is working ok in that sense. Its present and chmod set to 644.
However i am unsure what to do next. If I select a number of indexed files and apply, nothing happens and then i click create xml and i get the same errors. One thing i did, was select edit .htaccess and it comes up saying it does not exist. This i guess is due to permissions set as 644, I believe not being writeable?
Do I need to change permissions to ??? and then create sitemap etc and then can reset the htaccess file permissions back to 644, as a security precaution, or does that file need to be written to all the time by JoomSEF?
Is this sufficient info or you need more ?
I have not included my 'id' as its viewable by all, or am i being paranoid unnecessarily, oops, sorry.
i can re append if you wish?
Any help appreciated.

To be able to create sitemap file, the main Joomla folder (root) folder needs to be writeable for the user, under which the Joomla runs.
This is not related to .htaccess in any way.

ok, i will do some more checking , server/host side and get back to you