then I found I could at least boot into runlevels 1 and 2 for debugging, and named was actually starting/stopping just fine.
finally by examining the daemon sets between runlevel 2 and runlevel 3, and starting the daemons in sequence, i found the culprit...anytime i try to start the haldaemon (/usr/sbin/hald) the machine locks hard with no cmdline, dmesg or syslog errors.
for now i have used chkconfig to disable this daemon in all runlevels.
--- John
