.htaccess redirect

[Pezmo82]

Don't know if I'm in the right place here (apologies if I'm not).

I'm having some problems with rewriting a few URL's. I have a site that using spry accordions and I want to link directly to them using .htaccess
At the moment if you type domain.com/about it redirects via about.html page that has meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; and then redirects to the correct accordion panel, But... when it loads the page the URL is domain.com/home?panel=2 but I want it to be domain.com/about.
I have tried different .htaccess rewrite generators to work this out but no luck they always go to the correct page but the first accordion.

So at the moment I have:
RewriteRule ^about/?$ redirects/about.html
which then redirects to the correct accordion but without the clean URL.

Cheers.

[Pezmo82]

Anyone?