I've just spent far too long wrestling with the VHM, but I've finally sorted it. However, I don't understand exactly what was going on, and I'd love an explanation. I was trying to get requests for http://www.foo.com/Bar/rest/of/url to look in http://localhost:8080/demo/Bar/SomeFolder/rest/of/url and I was using RewriteRule ^/([^/]+)/?(.*) http://localhost:9080/VirtualHostBase/http/www.foo.com:80/demo/$1/SomeFolder... [P] to do this. It worked, but absolute_url was resolving to http://www.foo.com/rest/of/url. In order to fix absolute_url, I found after much hair-tearing that the following worked: RewriteRule ^/([^/]+)/?(.*) http://localhost:9080/VirtualHostBase/http/www.foo.com:80/demo/$1/SomeFolder... [P] Why did the second version (with _vh_) work, but the first not? Cheers, seb