iptables and SuSEfirewall2 errors

[edwardp at operamail.com]

I am running SuSE 9.1 Personal, system is generic home-built with an Intel Pentium/MMX CPU running at 166 MHz, 229 Mb of RAM.

Apparently, after recent YaST updates of iptables and SuSEfirewall2, I started seeing various errors at system startup. These all occur during the firewall initialization (phase 1 of 3), after the initialization of the "lo" interface (127.0.0.1/8) and before the initialization of the actual network card (eth0):

sbin/SuSEfirewall2: line 617: kill (2612) no such process 
iptables: resource temporarily unavailable 
iptables: Chain is not empty 
iptables: Chain already exists (if this one appears, it repeats 5 or 6 times) 
       
Please note I am not Linux-literate.

When this first occurred, I brought it down to run level 1 did an iptables -F (flush), -Z (zero), brought it back up to run level 5 and the errors did not appear. Upon rebooting the PC afterwards, the errors returned.

It had been suggested force-installing iptables and SuSEfirewall2 via YaST online update, this was done (had to change the icon to "update" in order for online update to download/install), and it did not remedy this afterwards.

As I am not Linux-literate, I have generally reformatted and reinstalled Linux when something goes wrong and I am unable to fix it. After reformatting and reinstalling 9.1, also downloading all available updates as well afterwards, this problem still occurs.

Any thoughts as to why these errors appear? On the surface, it looks like iptables is supposed to be clean (empty?) when the system starts up, but the files are present.

I can get online though without any problems, have been told that they are nothing to worry about, but these errors are becoming increasingly annoying.

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