I'm going to hijack this thread because I'm in the same situation. I'm familiar with Apache on *nix (Linux, Solaris, OS X) but I'm less familiar with Windows.
I'm using XAMPP for Windows 1.5.2 In C:\xampp\xampp\apache\conf\httpd.conf I've uncommented line 123:
LoadModule userdir_module modules/mod_userdir.so
and Line 494:
Include conf/extra/httpd-userdir.conf
That file looks like this:
<IfModule userdir_module>
UserDir "My Documents/My Sites"
<Directory "C:/Documents and Settings/*/My Documents/My Sites">
AllowOverride AuthConfig Limit Indexes
Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec
<Limit GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Limit>
<LimitExcept GET POST OPTIONS PROPFIND>
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</LimitExcept>
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from all
</Directory>
</IfModule>
After I stop and start apache and request:
http://localhost/~someuser/
I'm presented with 403 error in the browser and in C:\xampp\xampp\apache\logs\error.log is:
[Tue May 16 18:38:30 2006] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] client denied by server configuration: C:/Documents and Settings/someuser/My Documents/My Sites
What else do I need to do?