I have seen a few instances of new MacPorts users having issues that can be traced back to a fink installation on the same system. I'm starting to think that should be question that gets asked upfront on some of these cases. A misconfigured PATH, some debris in /sw can hose things up and it's no always evident that MacPorts isn't to blame.

I agree. I've planned to add a slight amount of verbage to the InstallingMacPorts doc about what to and why some users have /sw directories and haven't gotten around to it yet. People sometimes don't know that fink is still lying around. If someone else doesn't get there first, I think I can do that real soon, maybe even this weekend. It should ony take a couple of minutes. Mark