Thanks to all who replied to my message. As far as I know we
are still using the fifo version of GRASS. We are running
grass (not xgrass) on solaris2.3. The ipcs -aq command returned
hawaii% ipcs -aq
IPC status from <running system> as of Fri Mar 10 09:49:01 1995
Message Queue facility not in system.
hawaii%
I followed David Houlders second suggestion of rebooting and that
seems to have done the trick, some nuts require sledge hammers
I guess (particularly with my level of unix expertise!)
I'm still curious as to why this "epidemic" started.
Thanks again
Tom 
Tom Charnock O--O
Dept Civil Engineering (~~~~)
Aston University ( __ )
Birmingham B4 7ET UK /|\ /|\
charnotw@sun.aston.ac.uk