Wow thanks. I skipped the section in the install docs regarding installing Ubuntu since Amazon EC2 did that for me. That will make folks forget the apache2-mpm-prefork package among other things.
Regarding perms....it seemed easier to give Apache and Webwork access to everything with "chmod -R 770 /opt/webwork ; chown -R www-data.wwadmin /opt/webwork". It was easy and a blunt solution but perhaps that has issues.