I'm curious if anyone else has had this problem...

When I try and either restart or stop/start named I get a message that "the service is already running"...

Anyone have any ideas on what causes this and how I can correct it?

Thanks in advance...
Jill

It's probably switched on for that runlevel. What do you get from:
'chkconfig --list named'

SORRY, didn't properly read your post. It's giving the same message whether you star/stop/restart.

what command line are you using to start/stop/restart?
If you must take down named at all costs use
killall -HUP named

Under normal circumstances I would use
service named stop
(service is a red hat specific command tho, may or may not be available on mandrake)

I think the most likely cause of this, however, is that named isn't actually running, but the thing its init script uses (a pid file) is errantly claiming that it is. The way to see if something is *actually* running would be
ps -ax | grep named

You can also use
netstat -tl
(that's tL) to see what's listening for network connections, though it's possible that named could be running and not listening anywhere (not very likely though).

Have a look at the /etc/init.d/named script and see if it's using the presence of a file to determine whether it's running or not. The file would usually be something like /var/run/named.pid