"Perry E. Metzger" says:
> 
> 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

Semi-destructive testing!  Sounds cool.  I'll wear a hard hat and, as
always, protective glasses.

> 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.
...

Say this turns out to be correct.  Is there an easy remedy for this
symptom then?

All the best,
James

> 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
> > 
>