Odd, yes, but it works. I was unaware of suEXEC. Ouch! It requires recompiling Apache. I should have clarified that I eventually want to market this application to people who are not able to recompile Apache.
Are you sure it requires recompiling? On most distros it should be a default module. In Debian I found it precomiled at:
/usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_suexec.so