Dear Jan,
   Thank you for your reply.  However, venus always fails
now that cancelled-out and remade space for volumes.
It fails on every machine.  I guess I made a mistake when I
got the error message
 13:25:02 fatal error -- CommInit: RPC2_Init failed
but I still get the message when I am very certain there
are no venus running.
   One strange thing is that after it fails in the way shown
below, I have two venuses running.
Start with no venus running,
venus -init &
[some output from venus]
14:16:22 Venus starting...
14:16:22 Fatal Signal (11); pid 30190 becoming a zombie...
while doing setup I see one process "venus -init &" but
after it fails I see two venus processes.

In another case I got the message
18:18:19 Getting Root Volume information...
18:18:19 Venus starting...
18:18:39 fatal error -- vsgent::Connect: (0) failed (-2004)

  Because it failed on every machine, on one machine I installed
coda-5.3.4 (I was running coda-5.3.3)
and starting venus still fails, this time with the message in
the console file:
B scan (5400, 129603) (25, 75, 4)
18:10:26 fatal error -- CacheFile::ResetContainer: open failed (2)
18:10:26 RecovTerminate: clean shutdown
Assertion failed: 0, file "fso_cachefile.cc", line 132


Alan Scheinine