Re: File permissions and htaccess
The permissions on .htaccess do not seem to get changed by tiki, as far as I know (and I did check in a few of my installations, in which it has 644 perms), after the initial setup with setup.sh through console, or whichever file perms you set to that file through an FTP program.
I would suggest to ask in your hosting about that issue of that file being set with 777 permissions
I hope this helps..