This has been bugging me a while.

When I restart my machine three instances of ntpd get started. The
annoying symptom is that the second two instances log error messages like
"fails: Address already in use" intermittantly.

Just to make the messages go away, I do the following soon after boot:

1) # /etc/rc.d/ntpd stop
2) # pkill -9 ntpd
3) # /etc/rc.d/ntpd start

and then only one instance starts and I get no error messages.

There is only one line saying ntpd=YES in my rc.conf and no manual calls
in any of my rc.* files that I can find.

I do have 3 servers listed in my ntp.conf, but it seems to me that if
this was the problem, step 3 above, would once again spawn 3 instances
which it doesn't.

Any suggestions welcome...