-Condor 7.8.4 contains a bug that causes the negotiator daemon to write malformed entries in its =Accountantnew.log=. When the negotiator reads the =Accountantnew.log= on startup, it will abort upon seeing one of these malformed entries. This page describes how to deal with this problem.
+Condor 7.8.4 contains a bug that causes the negotiator daemon to write malformed entries in its =Accountantnew.log=. When the negotiator reads the =Accountantnew.log= on startup, it will abort upon seeing one of these malformed entries. The master will periodically attempt to restart the negotiator, and each time, the negotiator will abort and exit. As a result, no jobs will run in the local pool, as no matches will be made. This page describes how to get your pool working again once it's in this state.
+
+The following sections describe several different solutions.
 
 {subsection: Upgrade}
 
-Condor 7.8.5 will include a fix where the negotiator no longer produces these entries and automatically fixes them when read. Once 7.8.5 is released, you can upgrade your central manager machine. No further action will be required.
+Condor 7.8.5 will include a fix where the negotiator no longer produces these entries and automatically fixes them when reading the =Accountantnew.log=. Once 7.8.5 is released, you can upgrade your central manager machine. No further action will be required.
+
+{subsection: Full Downgrade}
+
+You can downgrade your entire Condor installation to version 7.8.3 or earlier. If you installed the RPM package, you can do this by running =yum downgrade condor=.
+
+After the downgrade, you will need to clean your =Accountantnew.log= of any malformed entries. One option is to simply delete the file. If you do this, Condor will lose all knowledge of past resource usage by users and user priorities set by =condor_userprio=, which is used by the negotiator when determining how many machines each user should be allocated to run their jobs.
+
+Instead of deleting =Accountantnew.log=, you can correct the malformed entries by running this command on unix:
+{code}
+% sed -i -e 's/< /</g' -e 's/ , /,/g' -e 's/ >/>/g' `condor_config_val SPOOL`/Accountantnew.log
+{endcode}
 
 {subsection: Partial Downgrade}
 
-The other option is to downgrade your negotiator daemon to Condor 7.8.3, which does not contain this bug, and then fix your =Accountantnew.log= to remove any existing malformed entries.
+You can downgrade just your negotiator daemon to Condor 7.8.3, which does not contain this bug, and leave the rest of your Condor installation at 7.8.4. This option is more complicated, but may be useful if you need some of the bug fixes in 7.8.4.
+
+Here are the steps you'll need to take:
+*: Download Condor 7.8.3 from the Condor downloads page (http://research.cs.wisc.edu/condor/downloads-v2/download.pl).
+
+*: Extract the 7.8.3 package
+
+*: Copy the =condor_negotiator= binary into the Condor SBIN directory with the name =condor_negotiator.783=
+
+*: Copy the =libcondor_utils_7_8_3.so= library into the Condor LIB directory
+
+*: Edit your configuration file to add this line: =NEGOTIATOR=$(SBIN)/condor_negotiator.783=
 
-You can download Condor 7.8.3 from the Condor downloads page (http://research.cs.wisc.edu/condor/downloads-v2/download.pl).
+*: Restart the Condor daemons
 
-You'll need to extract the 7.8.3 package, copy the =condor_negotiator= and =libcondor_utils_7_8_3.so= files into your installation directory, get Condor using the new negotiator binary, and clean the =Accountantnew.log=.
+*: Clean the =Accountantnew.log= as described in the previous section
 
 Here is a sample set of unix commands to use if you installed Condor from the tarball package into =/opt/condor=: