I tried Steve's suggestion. I went ahead anyway and set it up to start as a service and it did not work...
I still get the same error both in the console and in the error log file...
This is exactly what I was talking about here:
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message%5fid=252336
Anyway, hope some one can give me a hint. There is something that always fails during install. This one had never failed. So, I guess there is always a first.