I moved the general section after this started just to put it in alphabetical order, but that was just coincedence. It didn't change it. I have restarted the server many times while trying to resolve this. I use vi and pico on the server, so formatting shouldn't be a problem, but I did look for extra encoding and didn't see any. I think the server would throw an error in the logs if the permissions found an error.
Since I seem to be the only person with this problem, I doubt red51 has time for this. He has a lot on his plate i'm betting right now.