This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Self-Stabilizing Systems, WSS 2001, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in October 2001. The 14 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. Self-stabilizing software offers a unique, non-traditional approach to the problem of transient fault tolerance. The papers presented explore self-stabilization issues for various different manners of systems and software including communication protocols, cooperating mobile agents, routing in directed networks, crash-affected systems, security, and various other distributed systems and applications.