problems connecting to system bus on FC3

[C.L. Hammond]

system : Fedora Core 3
dbus : 0.22

Using the low-level C API Service List example from
http://www.redhat.com/magazine/003jan05/features/dbus/#low-level-c-listservice

here's the error :
org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Message did not receive a reply

it appears the system bus is running from ps output :

[sisa at sdr-01 dbus]$ ps aux | grep dbus
dbus      3941  0.0  0.1  2512 1260 ?        Ss   02:11   0:00 dbus-daemon
--system
sisa      4487  0.0  0.0  2540  656 ?        S    02:12   0:00
/usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients
sisa      4488  0.0  0.1  2292 1112 ?        Ss   02:12   0:00
dbus-daemon-1 --fork --print-pid 8 --print-address 6 --session
sisa      4958  0.0  0.0  3712  656 pts/2    R+   03:06   0:00 grep dbus


any ideas?

tia,
chris