Excuse me for fowollowing up my own post, but I just got another clue that might bear on the Mutell behaviour. I was just running Mutella as a daemon & it "hung up" for several hours. When I looked at the process table, I saw that one of the "mutella" entries had a huge life span - almost two hours. When it is working correctly, these process entries seem to have short lives. I assume that they are restarted reguarly. If my guess is correct, some process may be hanging.

The Perl script starts seven "mutella" processes on my system and the "hanging" process # is either 3 or 4 after the process # of the Perl script.

Maybe that could shed some light?

cheers,
johnd