I was recently porting a static website over to Drupal 6.0 and trying to set up 301 redirects in my .htaccess file - and since I have to go digging up an old .htaccess file every time I do this to remember how I did it - I thought I'd share it here.
#custom redirects
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/purple-monkey-dishwasher.php$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.kayte.ca/purple-monkey-dishwasher [L,R=301]
#end custom redirects
The first line is the old URL, and the second line is the new URL.