Guys, I appreciate your effort to help me, but it looks like my AWS account has some serious hidden issues going on. I completely wiped out CloudMan/Galaxy instances from my EC2 environment as well as their volumes, and waited a couple of hours for the instances to disappear from the instances list. After that, I repeated the whole process twice, trying to create a Galaxy cluster with 10 and then 15 Gb of storage space, but the result was equally frustrating with some minor differences. In the less unsuccessful scenario, the Galaxy service was the only one down, apparently for the following reason: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/mnt/galaxyTools/galaxy-central/lib/galaxy/webapps/galaxy/buildapp.py", line 36, in app_factory app = UniverseApplication( global_conf = global_conf, **kwargs ) File "/mnt/galaxyTools/galaxy-central/lib/galaxy/app.py", line 85, in __init__ from_shed_config=True ) File "/mnt/galaxyTools/galaxy-central/lib/galaxy/tools/data/__init__.py", line 41, in load_from_config_file tree = util.parse_xml( config_filename ) File "/mnt/galaxyTools/galaxy-central/lib/galaxy/util/__init__.py", line 143, in parse_xml tree = ElementTree.parse(fname) File "/mnt/galaxyTools/galaxy-central/eggs/elementtree-1.2.6_20050316-py2.6.egg/elementtree/ElementTree.py", line 859, in parse tree.parse(source, parser) File "/mnt/galaxyTools/galaxy-central/eggs/elementtree-1.2.6_20050316-py2.6.egg/elementtree/ElementTree.py", line 576, in parse source = open(source, "rb") IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: './shed_tool_data_table_conf.xml' Removing PID file paster.pid I restarted it a few times, rebooted the machine and even tried to update it, but nothing could magically fix the problem. I'm giving up the high-level approach and starting from a fresh installation of Galaxy in one of my instances. It's going to be less productive, but at least I have some control over what's going on and can try to diagnose problems as they occur. Cheers, F. PS: Dannon, one thing that intrigues me is how the web form manages to find out the names of the previous clusters that I tried to instantiate. Where does it get this information from if all the respective instances have been terminated and wiped out?