mod_rewrite newbie needs help

[kid_drew]

Ok, so I have a bunch of php files in my pub directory with an index.php file that accesses them all.  That's all fine and dandy.  What I want to do is rewrite urls so that people can access the site using www.xxxxxx.com/links instead of www.xxxxxx.com/links.php.  I have the following line in my .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^(.*)/?$ index.php?p=$1

And it barfs all over the place.  Index.php is designed to take 'p' from the query string and append ".php" to the end and load that page.  The pages don't actually load, so the rewrite doesn't appear to be working.  As a test, I echo $_GET['p'] to the screen and it returns "index.php".  And my css and images are not loading.  WTF am I doing wrong?