Perhaps my understanding of the 'baseUrl' was inaccurate. It was my understanding that the framework would be able to derive the baseUrl somehow. Apparently either this is not the case or was simply not working.

I resolved the issue by setting the baseUrl to the location where the webserver thinks the root document is located.

So, if my Apache installation (Linux) is pointing to '/var/www/zfApp/document_root' and is aliased '/zf' then the baseUrl needs to be set to '/zf'

edit: It also helps to make sure that if you use apache on a linux system to add "AllowOverride All" as an option for the app's doc_root directory.

That seems to resolve my issues.