I have SuSE 10.1. When I boot, I get an error message saying that ZMD does not appear to be running. After I click okay, the icon which indicates software updates are available disapears from my icon tray. How do I get it back?

ZMD is a system service. You should start YaST. In the left column click System. In the right side click System Services (Runlevel). You will see a new window. Look in the list of services near the middle of the list. You will see a service listed as novell-zmd. Click on that and then click on the Enable button at the bottom of the window. Then click the Finish button. That will start ZMD immediately. ZMD will start whenenver you restart Linux.

Been having this same problems finally tracked down a condition which I will describe fully.

I have several desktops and a laptop running Suse 10.1 & KDE in various combinations. The newest is a desktop I've set up for my Mum. It has three users - root, mum, myself - and I used the KDE Log-in Manager to set it to automatically login to my mum's profile. This works fine except that after starting up it gets to her desktop, logs on to her broadband service, and then shows the error message "ZMD does not appear to be running", if you click "close" the message goes away, and the Auto-update icon goes from the taskbar.

If I log out of her session and log in again as either root, or myself, ZMD runs and the auto-update icon appears again. After trying various settings on the log-in manager I have established that this is a consequence of having a user set to auto log-in. If I set one of the other users as the auto the problem appears there.

I then tried setting the zmd daemon to not start at boot (in YaST/System/System Services) and now the problem appears on all users, even if no auto log-in is set.

This is a real headache, she's 83, and had got used to useing e-mail with Thunderbird on Win 98. I refuse to upgrade to WinXP, and have her profile in Suse nice and simple. Once logged in she can work it OK, but starting up with an error message is an un-necessary confusion.

I'm going to look for somewhere to post this as a bug. Any thoughts?