Thanks for the suggestions; unfortunately it's still not working. There was nothing in "/var/llog/messages", but I disabled selinux anyhow. I'm still getting a "file not found" error.

I beginning to wonder if I have a deeper system issue though. The motherboard in my dev box blew out last week so I put the HDD in an available system. I don't know whether it's because the original had a 32-bit Intel chip and the new one has a 64-bit AMD, but some things have been a bit flaky. Python, for example, was complaining about not being able to find a module that's part of the base package. After recompiling it things worked normally again. I might just wipe it and reload. Keep you posted...