Links with WWW in Wordpress redirect to home page

Question

I've recently updated a website I work on to Wordpress 3.0. Something strange has started happening, where now the www. has dissapeared from the URLs, and if you add the www. to the URL (a good portion of the existing hardcoded links have it) then it redirects you to the home page URL.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

My .htaccess looks like the default for Wordpress 3.0 Multi-User

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

# uploaded files
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]

# add a trailing slash to /wp-admin
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]
RewriteRule  ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule  ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

The settings in my wp-config.php related to the multi-user are

/** Multi User */
define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

define( 'MULTISITE', true );
define( 'SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL', false );
$base = '/';
define( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'xxxx.ca' );
define( 'PATH_CURRENT_SITE', '/' );
define( 'SITE_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1 );
define( 'BLOG_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1 );

The URL settings for my domain is just the xxxx.ca, theres no www. infront of it.

Answer 1

What's in your .htaccess? Anything like this?:

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That redirect block strips the www from all URLs.

And what are the site URL settings in Dashboard/Settings/General? Do they have the www? And do you have site URLs configured in wp-config.php?