Problem Running Nessus

Hi there --

I have had Nessus running for several months now where on a nightly basis
several cron jobs are run that do the following:

                        1. An update of the Nessus plugins via the
/usr/local/sbin/nessus-update-plugins script.
                        2. A scan on our Windows servers and generates a file
that                       I check the following day. 
                        3. A scan on our UNIX servers that does a job similar to
that for Windows.

        The syntax of the Windows and UNIX cron jobs is the following:

/usr/local/bin/nessus -x -q 127.0.0.1 1241 <username> <password>
/home/<username>/<targetfile> /usr/local/apache/htdocs/outputfiles/<resultsfile>
-T html

Starting this past Saturday morning, the nessus-update-plugins script failed
with the following error message:

An unknown HTTP error occured (http error code: 1)
Could not retrieve the Nessus plugins
Aborting 

Similarly, the cron jobs failed and the error message that I encountered in both
instances is as follows:

        nessus : Could not open a connection to 127.0.0.1

The version of Nessus that I am running is version 2.2.3. I also tried running
the program in daemon mode, /usr/local/sbin/nessusd -D, but when I did a ps -ef
|grep nessusd check, the program did not appear to be running. I have also
rebooted the server to see if that would help matters, and it did not. Finally,
I verified the ip address and hostname of the server will still valid, and they
appeared to be. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks. 
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