[CentOS] apache permission problems

Well i finally got CentOS 4.3 booting, apache is installed, and im
trying to setup some virutal hosts, i want the main site to be my
default virtual host (which i had on my gentoo server) but i keep
getting permission denied errors:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to
use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

and in the logs i get:

(13)Permission denied: access to /favicon.ico denied
(13)Permission denied: access to /favicon.ico denied
(13)Permission denied: access to / denied

i have even tried chmod 777 on the /home/user/public_html dir and that
still didnt resovle the issue.  What user do the files have to be
owned by? i would assume the user, but i have also tried apache:apache
and root:root, since the original htdocs dir was owned by root:root. 
everything ive tried just gives me the same permission denied error.
here is my vhosts.conf file (i created it under conf.d)

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin webmaster at domain.com
        ServerName domain.com
        ServerAlias www.domain.com
        DocumentRoot /home/nick/public_html
        ErrorLog /home/nick/logs/error_log
        CustomLog /home/nick/logs/access_log combined

    <Directory "/home/nick/public_html">
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

It DID work with the default install, i got the default page, but for
some reason when i switch to virtual hosts i started getting denied.

I also have this in my httpd.conf file:

<IfModule mod_userdir.c>
    UserDir public_html

#
# Control access to UserDir directories.  The following is an example
# for a site where these directories are restricted to read-only.
#
<Directory /home/*/public_html>
    AllowOverride FileInfo 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>
</Directory>

<Directory /home/*/public_html/cgi-bin>
    Options ExecCGI
    SetHandler cgi-script
</Directory>

</IfModule>

any ideas? any other info you need to help me out?

thanks

Nick