Thanks everyone for the help. It was a combination of useful suggestions, blind optimism, tenacious persistence, and fervent desire to keep my job that eventually solved the problem. It was neither super simple, not really complex. The list of things I tried spans 6 pages in my notebook, so I won't bore you with that. But I will give you a quickie summary. The Problem: A previous sysadmin had built both zope and python from source. As is often the case, things end up in non-standard locations (or the standard locations change over time). So with the monthly system software updates, the installer (Red Hat EL 4's up2date program, based on yum) gave me new versions of zope and python. I apparently went from Zope 2.7.2 to Zope 2.10.5 and from Python 2.3.X to Python 2.5.2. I had no intention of updating either package, but neither was in the up2date exceptions file. After the update, zope was still running but wasn't serving any content. Even the ZMI and the Congratulations page were unavailable. I could see that the data storage had not been lost, but nor had it been touched since the update. I tried all sorts of things to get everything working again, but it looked like my best bet would be to install the latest versions of Zoep and Python and then import the old data. So that's the path I took. The Solution: I rebuilt both zope and python to the most current stable versions. In attempting to make the new packages work together, I noted that the old versions of python were installed in /usr/lib and the new versions were installed in /usr/local/lib. So even when I went back to a 2.4.X version of python it couldn't find all of the modules that had been earlier built for it. Once I moved some of the needed modules over, and rebuilt others, zope at least started working normally. Then after I moved the old data into place and restarted zope, all of the content returned. Summary: Be careful when updating python, it may leave all of its modules behind. Wes -- Wes Modes Server Administrator & Programmer Analyst McHenry Library Computing & Network Services Information and Technology Services 459-5208