I'm sure I left out some useful info... I call SA from each user's .procmailrc, it's a shared Bayes, on a Cobalt Qube, which I believe is based on RH7.
did you set your bayes_file_mode to 0666? That's a required thing if you're doing shared bayes, since auto-learning and opportunistic expiry will periodically change the owner of the file.
In general the messages you are seeing imply SA cannot read the bayes database, because of file permissions. Take a look at the file permissions and make sure they are set up properly.
