Enabling "localhost" for Applications?

[Pyth7]

Hi All,
Am new to Fedora 5 and linux in general.
Is there something -a service(?)- I need to
to start to enable applications to connect on
localhost?
I am trying to run an application (FreeWRL)
that uses a tcp socket connection in a server/client
relationship using "localhost" port 9877.
The client part can't connect and times out
,though the server part seems to run fine
per se.

thanks!
Russ Kinter