let me clarify a bit here about what's going on. The Zimbra xmpp server in the web page works just fine, no problems. The trouble comes in only when authenticating accounts with an external client. Openfire is completely uninstalled but the zimbra xmpp server was still somehow authenticating accounts against that, so in a moderately stupid move

we deleted the account database that Openfire was running (it was not linked with the Zimbra LDAP.) Now, the external clients are still trying to authenticate against the old Openfire database which no longer exits, the question is how do we get the Zimbra xmpp server to go back to authenticating against its own accounts?
Hopefully someone can figure this out or I'm going to pull out all my hair,
thanks