As far is the SYSERR about the zero size allocation. I would not worry about it, yet anyway. It is probably just from having no empires yet and will go away once you make an empire in the game. You might want to have the code handle the no empire case more intelligently, but I don't think it has anything to do with the bind problem.
Most of the time I have seen a bind error, it was from having more then one startup script trying to start the MUD multiple times. I would do a 'ps ux' and make sure you have only one instance of the MUD trying to start.
I'd get in contact with Magus, as he's the only one that I know of running an EmpireMUD at the moment. He might have encountered something like this.. I do forget where he's hosted his game, though.
02 Jan, 2009, absinthewolf wrote in the 27th comment:
I've been kicking around the Emud code for a couple of years now. I'd love to hear what you have in mind. It's a great chunk o' code to start from, and I'm always interested in new projects!
struct empire_data *empire = NULL;
int top_of_empiret = -1;
should I change that to 0 then maybe?