Joomla 1.5.25 : URLs get redirected to home page

We had a problem with a Joomla 1.5.25 site. whenever we clicked on any of the links in the Main Menu, the site shows only the Home Page.

We turned off SEF URLs from the Administrator Module. That did not work.

Then when we checked the apache log the problem was identified.


The log showed the following error :

warning: preg_match() [function.preg-match]: Compilation failed: this version of PCRE is not compiled with PCRE_UTF8 support at offset 0 in 

The pcre status was checked using

pcretest  -C

The Output was :

Compiled with
UTF-8 support
Unicode properties support
Newline sequence is LF
Internal link size = 2
POSIX malloc threshold = 10
Default match limit = 10000000
Default recursion depth limit = 10000000
Match recursion uses stack

Even though pcre was compiled with UTF-8 support, Apache was using the pcre which came with the PHP library (which is an older version).

So Apache was recompiled with the option '--with-pcre=/usr'.

This solved the problem and the URLs were working properly.