I walked through the other thread and followed the various directions.
When I transfered the .htaccess file I made over to the directory I got an upload success on two different ftp programs but neither one will show the file in the directory.
I also tried to change the chmod on the files folder and got the following error:
/xcart/files - Unable to change permission, file has different UID (39
I am still getting failed on all attempts to switch to file system