Hi Igor, I tried removing the cookie-related lines and replacing localhost with the ip address as you mentioned, but that gives me a 503 error from a browser on the server itself and the same inability to connect from other computers on the network as before. Here's the relevant entry in the error log:
[Wed Mar 21 09:00:46 2012] [error] (111)Connection refused: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 192.168.1.5:8888 (192.168.1.5) failed
[Wed Mar 21 09:00:46 2012] [error] ap_proxy_connect_backend disabling worker for (192.168.1.5)
Does this mean that there's another setting configuration that's out of place?