my i386.iso (which verifies fine) from ftp.netbsd.org about a week ago 
has an empty man.tgz and misc.tgz - no big deal.

the big deal was that after my installation i got my screen spammed with 
  errors from chown/chgrp not being found, followed by a drop to 
single-user.  my fstab was set up correctly and mount -a worked without 
a hitch.  i changed  rc_configured to YES and was able to boot (and 
work) fine in multi-user.

odd, i thought, perhaps because i tried to install misc?  i don't know. 
  at any rate i got more curious and installed a /usr/bin/chgrp and a 
/usr/sbin/chown on my / partition because the error was clearly occuring 
before /usr had been mounted.  when i rebooted i was greeted with a 
barrage of 'syntax error: expected ")"' messages instead of my normal 
ones complaining about not finding chown/chgrp.

the system still works fine.  anybody have a clue on this one?  it 
occurs just after init sets up the mfs /dev and i have nothing in my 
dmesg about it.  the only reference i find to chown in /etc is in 
rc.subr as a called subroutine.