I am guessing that what is happening is not that you aren't getting to 
single user mode, but that X being killed is leaving the console in a
screwed up state. One way you could (semi-destructively) test this
hypothesis would be to kill your X server the same way that init would 
kill it in going single user and see if your console is latched.

I believe init does a sequence of SIGHUP, followed by SIGTERM,
followed by SIGKILL, with the latter ones being done only if the
former did not work.

Perry

James Wetterau writes:
> 
> Testing running several slightly different sets of programs proved to
> my satisfaction that the culprit is X.  Specifically, when running the
> X server, if I shutdown now or kill -s TERM 1 I can wait five minutes
> and still my system will be unresponsive to the keyboard and
> apparently hung.  X will shut down, but that's it.  I'm using X11R6 as
> shipped with NetBSD 1.3.2 for i386, on a machine with a K6 300MHz chip
> and 64MBs of RAM.
> 
> If I don't run X I can get into single-user mode with no difficulty.
> 
> Any thoughts on how I can remedy this, or what further information I
> should provide?  Should I take this question elsewhere?
> 
> All the best,
> James Wetterau
>