[Zope] Newbie alert

[Michael Shanahan]

Ho folks,
golly, I honestly hate doing this so please forgive my apparent arrogance 
in that my first post is a cry for help.
I recently installed Plone, Zope latest releases on a Linux server in front 
of Apache.
Nothing fancy, an almost out of the box installation.
All seemed to be working fine until yesterday when everything stopped.
I have shell access to the linux box and have tried the following:
./stop
./start -D
which produces no errors. Yet. When I attempt to open my zope site or ZMI 
from within a browser, the browser appears to start loading the site and 
eventually stops after some considerable time.
If anyone can point me in the direction of a starting point then I'd be so 
deeply grateful.
Aside... I've worked as a database programmer for many years and realise 
how pathetic my problem must seem so please forgive me.
Many thanks,
Regards,
Michael