gpsd, DBus issues in 2.14

[Big Thurs]

I'm building a carputer. I had gpsd and roadnav running fine on Ubuntu but it is dreadfully slow so I decided to switch back to puppy. Here's the problem: gpsd will not send data to my client programs (xgps, gpsdrive, etc.). I keep getting "channel x is already active."
This is a P3 450mhz, 128m sdram running Puppy 2.14. Gpsd version is 2.33 from the debian package site and was installed with pb-debian installer (which works great, BTW.)

I'll start gpsd and get:

sh-3.00# gpsd -n -N -D6 /dev/ttyS1
gpsd: launching (Version 2.33)
gpsd: listening on port 2947
gpsd: unable to connect to the DBUS system bus
gpsd: running with effective group ID 0
gpsd: running with effective user ID 0
gpsd: opening GPS data source at '/dev/ttyS1'
gpsd: gpsd_activate: opened GPS (4)
gpsd: flagging descriptor 4 in open_device

and when I start a client (xgps here) I get:

gpsd: client connect on 7
gpsd: checking client(7)
gpsd: <= client(7): w+x
gpsd: client(7): assigning channel...
gpsd: User requires 2, channel type is -1
gpsd: client(7): channel 4 already active.
gpsd: client(7): channel 4 already active.
gpsd: => client(7): GPSD,W=1,X=1180325170.886135

I thought it was a dbus problem because it seems that gpsd is recieving data from the GPS and not sending the data to the client program via dbus (and it says on the 4th line "unable to connect to DBUS")
I looked in running processes and saw no dbus running so I fired it up in the console:

sh-3.00# dbus-daemon --system
"Failed to start message bus: Failed to read directory "/etc/dbus-1/system.d": No such file or directory"
So I created directory /etc/dbus-1/system.d

sh-3.00# dbus-daemon --system
Failed to start message bus: Failed to bind socket "/var/run/dbus/system_bus_soc ket": No such file or directory
So I created directory /var/run/dbus/

sh-3.00# dbus-daemon --system
Failed to start message bus: Could not get UID and GID for username "messagebus"
So I added user "message bus" (sh-3.00# adduser messagebus)

sh-3.00# dbus-daemon --system
Success!! Dbus daemon is running, so I try running gpsd again and, voila, gpsd successfully connects to dbus!

So I run gpsd again and get the same "channel x is already active" message.
I'm out of ideas at the moment.