Static routes

[Support of the day]

Hi,
this is my first post to this list, so i hope to meet the rules here.

We have two BIRDs acting as BGP-router, running since more than four 
years without any trouble.
Now we wanted to define some static routes with

route yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy/32 via xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;

We reload bird and the routes can be seen with netstat -r.
First question (just for learning) is: when we want to delete one of 
this static routes with a "#" at the beginning of the lines and reload 
bird, we still see this route.
So what is the right way to delete a static route?

Second question: the described issue was some weeks ago. This week we 
had to define some static routes, similar to the ones above. But this 
time it is not working, we cannot see the routes.  And:
/etc/init.d/bird restart
  * Restarting Internet routing daemon bird
bird: sk_open_unix: bind: Address already in use
bird: Unable to create control socket /var/run/bird.ctl
[fail]

This message is on both routers.
Perhaps this is the result of a syntax-problem in our both confs?

Dirk