There's a lot of brainpower going into this issue from several people. I wonder, would I be better off just forgetting it, uninstalling apache and using something like lighttpd. I ask this as a genuine request for opinion as I have absolutely no experience at all with "lighty" and have seen mixed reviews.

I can recommend Lighttpd, especially for resource-constrained systems.  It might not be as fully-featured as Apache but it'll certainly fulfil most needs.
Hell, it's so tiny you can run both and compare ;-)

--L