.first and .last navigation don't have active class

I'm new to Drupal, but I have experience writing WordPress extensions and themes and theming Joomla, so I do understand php, css, and html. As best I can determine, this is a php issue, but I'm not familiar enough with Zen and Drupal to say for sure.

I'm running Drupal 6.14 on an LAMPP localhost using PHP 5.2.9.

The problem is in the navigation.

Home About Link2 Blog

Home is the .first and Blog is the .last. Neither of these links is getting a .active class when I'm on the page, but the ones in the middle are.

I've backed up my Zen and tried every hack I could find on this, starting with the simple add home as a node and use an alias url suggestion I saw in the forums to trying the zen core hack suggested in the forums. (It really did look like it might work, but it didn't.) Any ideas? I really need the .active class to work on the .first and .last navigation links.