This post may be a little bit premature - there may be more multisite issues lurking - but given that the Drupal documentation seems to go out of its way NOT to be helpful, here's a quick tip for installing multiple Drupal-powered domains:

- don't use the 'default' site - it'll just confuse you. leave sites/default empty so that if a site falls through, it gives an error
- keep a copy of the original settings.php from your Drupal install lying around
- when you want to create a new site, put a fresh copy of the original settings.php into sites/default

Its about time to give the old website a new facelift, again. This time around I'm also changing the software that runs the site, going from a patchwork static page/blog to a proper CMS. I'm also hoping that the new software will simplify the administration of the other sites running from this server as well.

Its been the better part of the day just getting the site to its current state. The old content still needs to be added back in (at least the static pages), and there's more yet to do in terms of configuration, but I've had as much as I can handle for now.