After upgrading from Apache 2.2 to 2.4 in a Windows development environment, all my virtualhosts stopped working. I could add syntax errors to the files which would make Apache refuse to start up, or get notices about invalid document roots, but the virtual host server names just wouldn’t catch on.
After removing the reference to Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf things suddenly started working! Weird. The reason seems to be that the default vhost referenced in httpd-vhosts.conf uses _default_ instead of * to reference the virtualhost name. I’ve used * in all my configuration files, and apparently Apache refuses to reference any * references if it hits a _default_ name in the VirtualHost configuration first. That seems weird, so if someone has any more information about what’s causing this, I’m very interested.
My setup now works again, so I’m not going to start digging into the source to find the reason for this just yet. :-)