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Crap. Spent all morning trying to (re) install MySQL server on my somewhat new OS X 10.5 system (the 10.4 mysql package does work.) What a pain. Still not sure what the issue was, but it kept ending on startup. The useful clue I found was to look in the file ending with .err in the mysql data directory. This is where error messages get written, and indeed it informed me that I already had something (another instance of mysqld) running on port 3306. So I just killed that and then restarted the new server. Would have been more helpful if that error was directed to stdout as well as the file but I guess you can't have everything.