Apparently there was an issue with global caching. After turning it off. Joomsef worked as it should. now my site runs slow, but no more 404's

after a reinstall. I now have a base URL structure of www.askmichaelcohen.com/index.php/food-a...ulture/clothing/blog where index.php/food-and-drink/culture/ shows up before every SEF url?

I hate to say it. But this is such a horrendous problem and the fact that I can't simply create a custom URL pains me and makes me not want to use joomla.

I just upgraded (paid) and upgraded within the free system. After everything seemed to carry over smoothly i clicked on the links to my site and it affixed 10 subfolders to the url string.

ex. my page should look like www.mysite.com/celebrity1

and this is what is shown:

www.mysite.com/index.php/plugins/system/...ns/system/celebrity1

Which no returns an error and doesn't take me anywhere.

Thoughts?