[ ...... ]
> My problem led me to look for swapon, umount, and ttyflags.  since 
> permission is denied them early on, I can't help thinking this is at 
> least part of the problem.  I located them in the sbin directory.  I 
> cannot run them from the shell either.  Looking at the access priveledges 
> for them, forms the basis of my question.  The permissions were:
> 
> br-S--S--- 1 768    1792   96,   0 July 24  1926  swapon
> 
> the other two were similar.

Looks like your filesystem is severely corrupted. Time to reload the
backup tape I'm afraid :-(
Probably some junk ended up in the diskblock containing i-nodes...

Leo.