.htaccess help!

[Alexander Wallace <awallace@rwsoft-online.com>]

Hello there, I hope you can excuse my ignorance in these matters...

In order to protect certain html dirs with a password, I was told by a
good member of this list to make sure that I had the mod_auth enabled in
httpd.conf. Which I do.

Thend I was told that I need an .htaccess file which I created with
htpasswd in /home/myusername/.htaccess...

But when i create the file and look for
http://www.myserver.com/~myusername i get:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was
unable to complete your request... 

Can someone give me a hand here as to what i'm missing?

Thanks!