here's my answer, in case any one of you might have run into the same issue. apparently, if you did the "dirty" upgrade to panther, used the built in firewall, AND had printer sharing and something else enabled, this error pops up. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107786 --alan On Dec 13, 2003, at 7:12 PM, a l a n t h o m p s o n wrote: > can't even activate the firewall because some other firewall is > already running