Ok, so I decided to see what happened if I attempted to start the system without syslog. (Whats my muck-about machine for but to find this stuff out!). Anyway, contary to what I had expected from reading bug 22196 my system got nowhere. It stopped when runing init.d/random, and would not shut down (Ctrl-Alt-Del), as the ypbind script wouldn't run. I am assuming that it is the logging funcion of each of these scripts that is blocking - but I am not sure why. If minilogd is still running, shouldn't it keep accepting the messages? If minilogd is fixed not to chew RAM, shouldn't it just start throwing away messages? Anyway, I rebooted back into single user mode (1 fsck later) and restored syslog to startup, and all is back to normal, but shouldn't the system attempt to limp into service if at all possible? (Or at least allow a clean shutdown?)
minilogd is stuck waiting for portmap to say something.
A quick&dirty alarm handler will be in minilogd in initscripts-5.60-1, that should prevent this deadlock. It's still not recommended to run without syslogd running. :)
*** Bug 27771 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***