Ohh..and meant to mention...you may be able to get better assistance from the ipsec-tools mailing list, we can do our best here, but they are the experts.
Mike
Could you also send along how you are starting up racoon, and any error messages you are getting on the command line, and in the log files? (make sure you are starting with verbose/debug at full so you can see exactly what is going on)
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