Thank you Brian and S&G,
	But I haven't gotten much further.  The "netstat - a" gave me a list of 
ports that were "Active Connections" and 80 was one of the ones that the 
server was listening on, though the only 2 that were established were 
2472 and 2473.  For connections with port 80, on my computer or to 
others, the same error pops up:

  Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port)
  (Errno::EADDRINUSE)
is normally permitted. - bind(2)	from Chat_Server.rbw:6:in `new'
	from Chat_Server.rbw:6

As I said, I believe that I am trying to contact an Apache server within 
an Oracle installation and the Oracleora81HTTPSerever service has been 
started.

This code is sufficient to generate the error:

require 'socket'

host, port = '127.0.0.1', 80
server = TCPServer.new(host,port)

Thanks again for your time and if anything occurs to anybody about my 
problem I'd appreciate a suggestion.
	Barry


Sea&Gull wrote:

>> Maybe you are opening up a TCPServer that tries to listen 
> 
>  >on port 80 or some other port that is already in usage.
> 
>>
>> There is some command in windows to list the used ports, I just don't 
>> rember which.
> 
> 
> netstat -a
> 
> 
> -- 
>   s&g
>