Lots of stuff in this thread, but I think it all comes down to a botched uninstall which didn't clean things up.
Rather than treating his symptoms, I think that his issue comes down to that.
Also, it would be helpful to know why your installs failed so many times. Perhaps it's related?
My advice would be to totally remove zimbra. Then scan the dpkg database to see if anything is left over from zimbra. Then kill /opt/zimbra
If this is ubuntu, I'd run synaptic to see if any packages are broken before installing zimbra again.
Then once it's all done, reinstall zimbra.
But, that's just my thought
