I told him to double-check free space on the partition holding /etc, and make sure that root still has write perms to /etc, but other than that I have no clue. Please, someone, help me figure out what these folks have done to their poor box! :) It sounds to me like a problem with being unable to write to the various places programs write scratch files: /tmp /var and ~. My guess would be that one of those is either not mounted, has the wrong permissions, or is full. You can always run strace on the commands that are erroring, or look at the source and figure out what causes those errors. Jer --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org