Another little Zope horror story. You need to be worried only if you start external background processes from Zope. Today was not a good Zope day for me: Colleagues are currently installing a new firewall. Something went wrong and the Zope Webserver was frozen in connections with the backoffice behind the firewall. To get things start again, I stopped Zope and tried to restart it, but in vain! Zope continued to report "address already in use". Of cause, there was no longer any Zope process that used that port... After 1/2 hour of desparate search, I found the culprit. It was again an external background process. It had inherited the open listening socket and kept the port blocked. It, too, was frozen by the firewall and made no longer any progress. Killing the external process let Zope start again. The listening socket should get a "close_on_exec", too, as now do the request sockets. Dieter