Strange file permissions issue

Hi Folks,

I'm moving from one linode to another, and have a strange file permissions issue. I have a number of virtual hosts and would like to have them be owned by different users.

My proposed set up is:

User: mthaddon

Home: /home/mthaddon

HTML dir: /home/mthaddon/web.url/html

Apache root dir: /var/www/html

Dir permissions: 644 mthaddon.users

I then symlink from /var/www/html/web.url to /home/mthaddon/web.url and specify in the Apache config file that the doc root is /var/www/html/web.url/html. Everything looks like it should work fine, and in my test case it did. I then set up another user, moved his files over, and followed the same pattern for this user. Problem is, for some reason his files show "you don't have permission to access this" unless I make the permissions 777.

I should specify that these are php files, not cgi files, and also jpg/png files.

Can anyone help out?

Thanks, Tom