Problem with 301 redirect for aliased (and clean) URLs.

Hi, I changed the name of one of my pages, but wanted to do a .htaccess Redirect 301 to redirect the page that's indexed on the search engines to my new page. Note that my page (new one) has a URL alias assigned. I also run with the clean URL's option (i.e., no ?q= ) on my site. Here's what I coded:

Redirect 301 /old_page http://mywebsite.com/new_page

Where you actually get redirected is to http://mywebsite.com/new_page?q=old_page

Note that old_page doesn't exist anywhere in my site (so far as I know), it was only indicated in the redirect.

Also, I'm doing RewriteCond/RewriteRule to strip the www. which may be causing a (the) problem. Anyway, I placed the Redirect both before and after the rewrites to see if that had an effect. Placing it before gave me I believe it was a 500 Unauthorized Access. Placing it after worked, but inserted the ?q= which shouldn't be on my site since I'm running clean URL's. Has anyone ever see this or might have a suggestion on what my problem is?

Thanks.