> How about reconfguring it to put those files someplace a bit more 
> permanent long enough to troubleshoot this?

Yup...that seems like a great idea now!!! Too bad I didn't do that
awhile ago! (argh) Hindsight is of course 20/20...I'll do that now for
future reference.

> I was "Just checkin", girl.  One tries not to leave too many stones 
> unturned when looking for clues :)

Well call me Nancy friggin' Drew, then...because I am beating my head
against a wall here!!
 
> Yeah, 'tis kinda ancient, and I notice Jon's being quiet, too quiet, 
> he is letting me hang my self by my own petard here. :-)

'Kinda' ancient??? Don't be nice on my account. I've been trying to get
this baby upgraded for a year+ to no avail, complaining about outdated
SSL/SSH, apache, OS, etc. The company we sold this site to doesn't do
anything open source/unix. They are recoding the entire thing on some
windows platform.

But I digress - If it's a sol6 thing, I would love to hear it, at least
then I could solve it. We really don't do anything to this box except
for clearing the apache logs once a week and rebooting it every
Wednesday (per the request of the new owners. Hey - I just work here.) 
> 
> OTOH, conversation that might bring up the problem is always good.  
> Me, I know diddly about solaris other than what little has soaked 
> in thru osmosis from this group.  And thats not a lot...

I work more in solaris here than linux...we kept our backup servers in
linux because we already had the tape hardware for intel...