Ok, I still haven't solved this problem, but I have discovered it's two seperate problems. That of the occasional restart by apache crashing and that of the failed starting due to the dlls. The one i'm concened with mostly is the dlls. It seems that they get changed at 3am every day that the Apache server is running. Once this occurs, when apache stops for any reason (graceful or not) Apache fails to start again until the modified dlls are replaced with the originals. Any thought into this would be much appreciated, Thank you for you time, Luke