A multisite nightmare!

Hello,
I hope I am posting my issue in the right place.
I have a working multisite setup on my local server, 1 drupal 6 installation with 2 sites, 2 different databases (main english site and a french site). The nightmare begins when I upload my site(s) upto a web host.
It took me 3 days and a cumulation of over 7 hours of online live chat, to get the first (main site) to show on their url (I'm moving the sites to them before transferring the domain). In the end, the solution to get the first one to display was to add:

$base_url = 'http://hostserver/~myusername';

and added to the .htaccess:

RewriteBase /~theccro5

# Rewrite URLs of the form 'x' to the form 'index.php?q=x'.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

So now I can access the english site. My problem now is how to get the french site to work. I have gone over these articles:

http://drupal.org/getting-started/6/install/multi-site?no_cache=1255148179

http://drupal.org/node/239583#comment-786932

http://community.contractwebdevelopment.com/drupal-multisite-configurati...

http://groups.drupal.org/node/19161#comments

especially: http://groups.drupal.org/node/19161 which I followed (title: I've been excatly where you are) and redid 3 times already!

my multisite.php in the public_root looks like this:

print `ln -s /home/~username/public_html/ /home/~user/public_html/frenchsite`;

my directories are:
public_html>sites>
default and frenchsite
the settings.php in each correspond to their databases.

I even added this to the .htaccess:

RewriteBase /~theccro5

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/~username/public_html/sites/frenchsite
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ frenchsite/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

# Rewrite URLs of the form 'x' to the form 'index.php?q=x'.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

Everything I read online so far talks about these files, similar settings. What am I missing?

I still get the 403 Forbidden error: Access is forbidden to requested page.

Please advise soon, I should have gotten the french site up today :-<<<<<<<

I believe its a small tweak somewhere, I just can't find it!

Thanks.