Well, I figured it out and it was a really dumb mistake. The answer is: don't start zope, let the webserver do it <g>. I added a zope startup script in the /etc/rc.d/init.d directory with the really bright idea that having it started would cut down on the apache --> zope connection time; totally missing the point that apache starts zope. So when apache tried to start zope there was already a zope running, and the database was locked by this other process.
Now when we got ready to move it, surprise!, zope wouldn't run. We'd get the following error in the pcgi.log : "DatabaseError: Could not lock the database file. There must be another process that has opened the file." Alan posted a question on this for me and Bob OConnor answered that it sounded to him to be a file attributes problem.
We start zope through an /etc/rc.d/init.d startup script (which calls the zope start script. So I believe we're starting zope (and zap) as root so the user should be nobody, correct? What about the group?
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