I'm having a problem where some of my users have a full stop / period in the middle of the name so for example

john.smith

When they try to login the get a file not found error, I've worked around this at the moment by altering the 404 error handling to redirect to the frontpage where it shows them as logged in but I'd like to fix this properly.

Why do they have dots in the middle ? it because we are using our main college usernames which are dotted to make it simpler for the staff so they only have one ID to remember. The are signed up automatically by directly injecting there username etc into the mysql backend.

Is it possible to alter the .htaccess file to allow this ??

Thanks
Brian