URL encoding in admin overlays - breaks overlay

Question

I have a fresh install of Drupal 7 with no content, and a few extra modules installed. Recently as I've navigated on the admin side, the URLs for the overlays have escaped HTML in them, like this:

http://mywebsite.com/#overlay=%3Fq%3Dadmin/config

Which of course is supposed to mean

http://mywebsite.com/#overlay=?q=admin/config

But still, the overlay doesn't show up properly.

I've found a few reports of this, but no fixes, other than to disable overlays. Can anyone offer anything?

What's tricky about this is that I can't get to administrative features because the overlays can't show up.

Answer 1

I'm reasonably sure that the Overlay module doesn't work without clean URLs.

If http://mywebsite.com/#overlay=admin/config doesn't work, make sure that clean URLs are working properly.

Answer 2

Apparently this error is not related to URL encoding, but the lack of overlay module support when mod_rewrite is not properly configured in the Apache web server.

See http://drupal.org/node/1337420#comment-5238454.