I've sucessfully installed MySQL (from source) onto a RH7.3 machine. No problems.Users are fine, permissions are fine, it starts automatically when the server boots, no problem there.The 'issue' I ...

Post the cron script in question. That looks like the cron script is trying to run the mysql server, something it shouldn't be doing.

There are plenty of GUI tools available that can manage your MySQL database, even from the Windows environment.