Warning about bad shutdown preventing apache from running?

Question

For some time now, Apache has been refusing to start. The only thing in the error logs is this:

[Thu Dec 10 20:48:39 2009] [warn] pid file C:/wamp/bin/apache/Apache2.2.14/logs/httpd.pid overwritten -- Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Thu Dec 10 20:49:18 2009] [warn] pid file C:/wamp/bin/apache/Apache2.2.14/logs/httpd.pid overwritten -- Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Thu Dec 10 20:50:22 2009] [warn] pid file C:/wamp/bin/apache/Apache2.2.14/logs/httpd.pid overwritten -- Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Thu Dec 10 21:07:20 2009] [warn] pid file C:/wamp/bin/apache/Apache2.2.14/logs/httpd.pid overwritten -- Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?
[Thu Dec 10 21:07:52 2009] [warn] pid file C:/wamp/bin/apache/Apache2.2.14/logs/httpd.pid overwritten -- Unclean shutdown of previous Apache run?

Seeing how this is just a warning, I don't see how this could prevent Apache from running, yet it does. I've restarted the computer several times, installed and un-installed the service, but nothing seems to work.

Is this a common problem? Or is it something specific?

Answer 1

It's a lock file that signifies that Apache is already running. If you kill the program (or it manages to crash) and this file is left behind, no new instance of the program will run.

Simply trash the file and then you can bring up new instances of Apache.