Joomla 2.5 Transfer Internal Server Error

I had the following error while transferring a copy or working Joomla 2.5 from one server to another. 

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@extendcp.co.uk and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

I've written a blog about something similar before

joomla 1.7 installation A file permissions error has occurred. Please check the permissions on the script and the directory it is in and try again.

However setting the permission to ALL folders to 755 and 644 was not the answer in this case.

The solution was in .htaccess and that the site I was copying over had a password protection set in the .htaccess .   The solution to this was to use the htaccess.txt in the the latest Joomla 2.5 download . and changed it to .htaccess