Noob: Can't get SSI to work with Apache

[Fluffy]

First off I am a complete noob when it comes to doing anything with servers. I'm just beginning to learn today because I need to start adding SSI to my websites. I apologise in advance if I am making a really obvious mistake.

To test this, I have successfully installed apache and have read the official documentation on how to get SSI functionality working. Unfortunately, I can't get it to work at all. After reading tons of threads on this matter on various forums, I am still short of an answer.

Being a complete noob, I am not used to editing the httpd.conf and so I think I have probably just screwed this up somehow.

My test directory looks like this:
index.shtml
menu.html

index.shtml contains <!--#include virtual="/menu.html" -->
menu.html only contains html content without body, head or html tags

The relevant parts of my httpd.conf look like this:
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
...
AddType text/html .shtml
AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml

However, when I go to [localhost...] it brings up a directory list instead of automatically opening index.shtml (as it would if it were index.html) and when I click on index.shtml, the page is rendered in code rather than content.

I have also tried changing all the ".shtml"s to ".html"s and this renders the content of index.html correctly but ignores the SSI.

Thanks very much for any help that anyone can provide!

[jdMorgan]

See the following directives, some or all of which you may need to add, depending on your current configuration:

AddHandler server-parsed
Options +Includes
DirectoryIndex index.shtml

Jim