As said before, I think by Paul too, having a DocumentRoot on a FAT partition sounds "crazy". Why? Because FAT does know _nothing_ about UNIX permissions. Run your Apache documents on a Linux filesystem and the ghosts will as quickly disappear.
using a vfat partition - I can understand that you think it'øs crazy but then I'm quite new to linux and don't quite feel comfortable losing the possibility to read the files in /www from my winXP installation. That's just what I'm used to. I'll accept if it can't be done - but it sounds like it _can_ be but it's problematic (at least for me so far).
so I either give up and lose my safety net while i continue to learn linux (seems rather rash) or I keep trying to make this work.
but, *i do* understand why you might think i'm being silly - I just want to play safe.
Another option you might want to try would be mount your FAT32 partition on /var/www/html instead of on /mnt/SharedFiles/www and set the DocumentRoot back to the default setting?
That would at least eliminate the DocumentRoot configuration changes as a reason for any failure, leaving you just with permissions etc. as reasons.
Paul.