Is there a way to find out if a server supports mod_rewrite & .htcaccess
I'd create a test scenario by adding mod_rewrite to .htaccess. There's an example here.
http://us3.php.net/apache_get_modules will output something similar to the following:
Array ( [0] => core [1] => http_core [2] => mod_so [3] => sapi_apache2 [4] => mod_mime [5] => mod_rewrite )
Just look for mod_rewrite. You could even write a small function using in_array() to make it easier to determine whether a given module is loaded or not.