forgive my ignorance, i'm 2 days old regarding my LINUX experience.

apparently our access log reached a size larger than 2 gigs and i believe the cron jobs stopped running as a result.

when i check status, i get:
crond dead but subsys locked

trying to stop it i get:
Stopping crond: [FAILED]

the resulting errors in the log file say:
May 17 16:15:38 www crond: crond shutdown failed
May 17 16:16:01 www squid[9783]: error: bind: Address already in use
May 17 16:16:01 www squid[9783]: fatal: Bind to port 1837 failed: Transport endpoint is not connected.

I stopped squid services and stopped and started crond, but the same error messages where generated.

i'm not sure where to go from here.

You just need to clear the lock, because cron apparently failed without doing so:

rm -f /var/lock/subsys/crond

yeah, i've done that, but when i start services again, the lock file reappears, and I get the same messages about failing to bind to port 1837.

Squid has nothing to do with crond. Take a look at /var/log/cron to see why it's failing, strace cron to find the point of failure, or check with your distribution for an update.

looking back, the var/log/httpd/error_log has a number of
May 7 15:34:23 www httpd[1969]: [notice] child pid 22252 exit signal File size limit exceeded (25)

before it stopped writing entries. this i attribute to the large (over 2 gig) access_log which i deleted.

the /var/log/cron doesn't report any errors but simply stopped writing entries at the same time the error log did.

I'll check for updates.