Well, I found the problem, but not a real solution. the problem is that
one of the vhosts had "ServerAlias *". Removing this, allows all our
vhost files to be correctly read and used. However, now we are seing
some strange inexplicable problems with our site, and one of the devs
says the severalias * is required by adobe to work. This means, to
ensure this directive is the very last one, we have to put all our many
virtual hosts entries into one giant vhost file, and put the * allies on
the last...