Is Apache being stubborn and not paying any attention to your carefully crafted .htaccess files when organising virtual hosts? Is it messing up your otherwise impeccable website hosting skills? It could be that it is listening to .htaccess files, but not to any on a 'per site' level.

This is fixed as follows:

Go to the httpd.conf file, open it.

Find (alt-f AllowOverride) the following:

# AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files.
# It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords:
# Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
#
AllowOverride None

Then alter the AllowOverride to read:

AllowOverride All

Now any .htaccess file in a site's root folder will be read by Apache. It is VERY important you alter the right AllowOverride option as there is more than one, hence displaying the section above the correct one above.