I get an error that looks like this: "no start line:pem_lib.c" or "no end line:pem_lib.c". What does it mean?

Apache-SSL uses a toolkit called SSLeay, by Eric Young, for its security routines. SSLeay is very fussy about the format of certificate requests and certificates. In particular it wants BEGIN and END lines that look like this for certificates:

 
            
   -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
           
   blah blah blah
             
   this is actually your
            
   certificate BASE64 encoded
            
   to make it easy to transport
            
   by mail
            
   -----END CERTIFICATE-----
            

If your certificate has trailing spaces after the BEGIN or END lines it will bomb with the error you see. Usually, the problem is that your browser created trailing spaces when you cut and pasted the certificate from the browser window into a text editor to create the certificate text file. Just remove the trailing spaces (on UNIX you may also need to get rid of CTRL-M characters) and all will be well. :-)