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

After getting Apache/2.2.16 (Win32) PHP/5.2.14 configured,

I got this error when trying to access a virtual host on my localhost server:

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

the solution turned out to be to edit my http-vhosts.conf and add this inside each Virtual Host definition:   

    <Directory "C:/path/to/my/files/">

            Allow from all

    </Directory>