Reasons for -468 error???

we are using a online engine 5.01 UD3 on a HP 857 with HP-UX 9.0 While starting to run a application I got a Error -468. -468 Cannot obtain user id from system: unable to start database server. Your application is trying to open communications to a database server. As part of doing this it has to read your user id from the system password file, and it failed to do this. Look for operating system error messages that may give more specific information. Consult with a system administrator to make sure the file of user ids is readable to all users. Can someone tell me if the informix engine calls are different than the HP-UX unix system calls and if the engine uses the user id from a process table or the /etc/passwd file to "read in" the user id. I have tried to comment out the user id from the password file and could recreate the error. is there any other way that this error could occur. Any comments regarding this issue would be appreciated. Thanks Sidney D'souza sid@shack.csci.csc.com