Ok, virtual hosts is working for me. But the problem is that the search engines (yahoo, google) are picking up pages that are for domain1 with domain2. For example, let's say domain1 is a petstore like petstore.com and domain2 is a car store like cars.com. When you do a search on yahoo for car parts one of the hits comes out as http://petstore.com/carparts.html when it should be http://cars.com/carparts.html. That's confusing and I'd like to stop it...

Here is my apache2 vhosts section:

<VirtualHost *>
ServerName www.cars.com
ServerAlias cars.com
ServerPath /cars/
DocumentRoot /usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-3.3.1/webapps/cars
ErrorLog logs/cars.com-error_log
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost *>
#ServerAdmin webmaster@petstore.com
ServerPath /petstore/
ServerName www.petstore.com
ServerAlias store.petstore.com petstore.com
DocumentRoot /usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-3.3.1/webapps/petstore
ErrorLog logs/petstore.com-error_log
#CustomLog logs/petstore.com_log common

Is the error above somewhere or maybe somewhere else in my apache2 httpd.conf file? There are some other suspicious parts of my httpd.conf file that I haven't changed for fear of breaking something that works. One is a line that shows the serverroot to be:

ServerRoot "/usr/local/apache2"

I also have these two lines that are suspect:
DocumentRoot "/usr/local/apache2/htdocs"
DocumentRoot "/usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-3.3.1/webapps"

Am I way off base? Anyone have any ideas? (maybe it's just the wrong html!?)

My guess would be since you have everything served out of that webapps directory, its mixing them up.

Just for grins I changed the DocumentRoot for one of the sites but I'm still having the same problem:

www.petstore.com gives me the right site
www.cars.com gives me the right site

but

www.petstore.com/cars/ gives me the cars.com site
www.petstore.com/petstore/ gives me the petstore site
www.cars.com/petstore/ gives me the petstore site
www.cars.com/cars/ gives me the cars site

I am just absolutely confused. Ready to blast the server and try all over again..

You need to set the DocumentRoot of each vhost to the top level directory of each site. These should be separate directories and should not have any hard or symbolic links between them. That ServerPath directive you have may be what's giving you problems -- I've never seen it used (just the DocumentRoot). Are you using Tomcat? I know Tomcat does some strange things with paths, but I haven't played around with it enough to know the exact details.

I am using tomcat..

I thought I was? Do you mean something different than this:
Also, I tried it without the ServerPath statement but unfortunately it didn't make a difference. Any other ideas?