Hi, The software updater system tray icon indicated today with an orange exclamation mark that there are some updates to download. So, I said go ahead and update (there were about five or six to do, I think). After reaching 17% (from watching gkrellm, one package had been downloaded and installed), all network traffic, CPU and disc usage ceased. I waited for several minutes, then killed the software update process. I restarted the software update process, but now it hung at the "retreiving updates" stage. So, I killed it again, and restarted zmd for good measure. (rczmd restart failed, so I manually killed the zmd processes before rczmd restart again, which now worked). Neither zmd nor zen-updater were using any CPU, disc or network for some time before I did this. Then, I restarted zmd, and ran software update again. This time I got two error dialogs, containing the following crash information: ====== System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object in <0x003d6> Novell.Zenworks.Gui.ZenTrayIcon:CheckUpdatesLoop () in (wrapper delegate-invoke) System.MulticastDelegate:invoke_void () ====== and another, which was much longer (and probably more useful), but which I couldn't select since the one quoted above was application-modal and on top. When I dismissed this one, the other and the software update window disappeared. Now, when I restart the updater, I get only the one above, and it immediately exits. zmd appears to be running OK. Invoking Software Update from YaST produces a long pause followed by a "Another process is accessing the package database. Package management will not work!" then exits. Anybody have any ideas? I'm about to reboot the system. -- Bill Gallafent.