esd says "unable to bind port 16001"

["Louis F. Melahn" <lfmelahn@hotmail.com>]

Hello,

I installed Helix Gnome on my Potato Debian system. Of course, a lot of
the Gnome packages depend on EsounD, so the esound-common and esound
packages were installed alongside the Gnome ones. Now, my sound hardware
works fine: I have an Opt0924 chipset, and I use the mad16 driver. All
the ordinary sound utilities work perfectly (i.e., playmidi, wavp,
etc.). But I can't get the Enlightened Sound Daemon (esd) to work;
whenever I invoke it (without options), I get the following message,

  Unable to bind port 16001

and then it aborts. What does that mean, and how do I fix it? I am using
the latest version (at the time of this writing) for both the esound and
esound-common packages: 0.2.18-3, which comes from the Woody
distribution. However, the version from Potato (0.2.17-7) exhibited
exactly the same behavior.

This error is preventing all of the programs that use esd from working
properly.

Thanks,
L.M.