oops - webpage redirects break a site.

I was moving a test site to a live site this morning and in doing so added a couple of redirect lines to the htaccess file/ mod rewrite installation to try and move any broken links to the main index.php page. Unfortunately this has somehow broken the website and now every single page ends up with a 302 which firefox displays as "Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete."
I've removed all the redirections that I can find but for some reason the website is still running the redirection as valid test html pages still get redirected to the php page and then the 302. I think I am going to have to wait until the webservice is restarted but I've logged a ticket in the meantime.