I have installed on Win 2003 server and installed apache as a service. The service however doesn't get started automatically on startup, even though it show in the service control manager that it should. If I start the service by hand, the web server responds to http requests and works fine. However, when I log out, the service stops and I must relogin and start it again.

Anyone have any ideas?

please follow the steps below:
1) stop the service
2) cleanup apache logs
3) reboot 2003' server
4) check if apache started and do not run it if not
5) check apache logs, especially error.log

but first, make sure you have no IIS or anything else running on 80th port