David had a good point and I recompiled and installed the kernel with 
DEBUG and DIAGNOSTIC enabled.  Sure enough, two hours later, crash with an
alignment fault.  Would anyone be able to help me get to the bottom of this
mess?  Either with suggestions on how to deal with the core images being
generated so rapidaly, or suggestions on where to look for this problem?
I've swapped out three machines now, and the problem persists, so, I think
it is a software problem.
-any help much appreciated.
-thanks
-Brian
On Nov 16,  3:59pm, David Brownlee wrote:
} Subject: Re: Problems with NetBSD 1.4.1+ on Sparc 5
} 	Are you running a kernel with DEBUG and DIAGNOSTIC - it sounds
} 	like whatever the problem is is corrupting kernel data, and
} 	DEBUG and DIAGNOSTIC may help to trac it down at the point of
} 	corruption, rather than sometime later.
} 
} 		David/absolute
} 
} On Tue, 16 Nov 1999, Brian Buhrow wrote:
} 
} > 	Hello folks.  I'm trying to keep a NetBSD/sparc 1.4.1+ system running on
} > an 85MHZ Sparc 5 running.  I keep getting kernel faults and alignment
} > errors.  This is a stalk 1.4.1 system, except that I pulled down the latest
} > locore.s and ccd.c files and remade the kernel.  These changes did not help
} > the problem.  The machine is running a 2-disk ccd striped across 2 9GB
} > disks and is trying to run inn.  This problem has existed more or less
} > since NetBSD 1.3, but is very pronounced under 1.4.1.  The machine is now
} > in a state where it cannot stay up more than 6 hours.  In addition, it
} > seems to nibble on its news spool by corrupting inodes, and otherwise
} > sabotaging itself.  I have it spewing kernel core dumps, but they don't
} > appear to be usable by gdb and dmesg won't read them.
} > 	Any help aanyone could provide would be extremely helpful.
} > -thanks
} > -Brian
} > 
} 
>-- End of excerpt from David Brownlee