UPDATE
OK, I was having a pretty persistent version of the above described problem this morning.
Normally, the "cannot start HTTP" messages come up for a few minutes until all the external connections to it go stale, then the server is able to start. It seems tonight there may be someone persistently trying to load the page... which led me to drill down on the error & actually find a solution.
Google led me to this page on MTA's dev area..
http://bugs.mtasa.com/view.php?id=5392 Which took me to
http://linux.mtasa.com/ where I found & quickly installed, then successfully ran
MTA 1.0.4 - Linux server package.
Release 7 (build 1873) - Updated 25th July 2010
So be careful fellow MTA server admins.. it seems they're updating the builds of both the client (auto) and server (ninja style) without changing the main version number now.
The server does seem to be running better now with the new version.. I've updated the way I name the AGS and DRuG servers to include this new version numbering the mta team seem to have moved to... lets hope they have resolved this issue fully & this error doesn't appear again.