[TYPO3] behavior on not existing requests?

[Giannis Economou]

Hello,

I'm trying to change default behavior for handling requests for not
existing pages/resources, but I can not find out what is wrong.
I've set in t3lib/config_default.php:
'pageNotFound_handling' => '1'

afterwards ...
1. A request for: http://www.example.com/foo.html, when foo.html does
not exist, correctly show an error message ("the page did not exist").
2. When requesting http://www.example.com/foo.htm (where foo.htm again
does not exist) I'm getting the root/index page of the site and not the
error message.
3. When requesting http://example.com/bar/foo.htm or
http://example.com/bar/foo.html (where none of these are valid, again),
I'm getting the root/homepage again, but this time without the
stylesheet and images being loaded, too.

What I want is a consistent behavior of an error message (and later I
will replace 'pageNotFound_handling' with a custom page).

I'm not using realurl. I'm using page aliases with
config.simulateStaticDocuments = 1.

Thank you.

Best regards,
Giannis Economou