It turned out that my problem with daemons not starting properly was
because I had previously replaced /etc/sh with a link to /etc/ksh so
that ksh would always run instead of sh. (I did this to avoid problems
with ksh-specific features called up in my environment file. Now I just
test [ $0 - ksh -o $0 -ksh ] at the start of this file to avoid the ksh
stuff for non-ksh shells.)

Putting sh back solved the problem.

Ian