Wordpress Woes

I am having some problems with the .htaccess file on the Wordpress level. I tried regenerating the permalinks. Hope that will help for a while.

A couple of days ago there was a lonely s at the end of the file. Amakhala scared.

And:
I am seeing a lot of “MySQL server has gone away” error messages in different context,
e.g. when I updated the WP install, when I try to access the website, in the right-hand area displaying categories.

I asked the hosting company and they pointed me to this link (which I haven’t tried yet).

If you have any hints please let me know.