Errors in site after new install

Bingo!

That fixed it!! Thanks so much for the help. No idea how that .htaccess content came to be there. Makes me a little uneasy, but I’m relieved to have it fixed. Thanks so much for your help! I’ll tell my host not to worry

On the contrary, I think your host should be worrying about how that got there. It looks like some kind of data stripper; I’m not really conversant with the syntax of .htaccess, but that second line looks to me like it sucks up the entire query string of every page request. This would get any data being passed in the query string, which can be sensitive information in poorly-designed scripts.