OK - while mucking around with console and certificates, I manually clipped out the stuff from admin-serv/config/adm.conf & console.conf and local.conf and seem to have everything back in order. I restart the admin-serv and the encryption stuff comes right back into local.conf and I can't figure out where it is coming from. So the console tells me that the Administration console is stopped when it isn't stopped but it can't access it. Any clues? (I am getting into a lot of trouble with the console application) ;-) thanks Craig