Thank you both for your suggestions about how to deal with the
'sysinst terminated' problem.   The end result is that I had to
install all my boxes by hand, sysinst never worked on any of my
systems.

I did that upgrade by following the recipe in sysinst.   There is no
real document about what needs to be done for an upgrade or install,
only the code in sysinst.   It seems that there should be a "this is
how we install and upgrade" document which spells out what should
happen, not the code being the document.   And then the code is written
to follow the document.   Hmmm ... perhaps another bug report is in order.

I submitted a bug report on 'sysinst terminated' that says that
this problem has been apparently occurin for some time, and has
not yet been fixed.   I added evidence of where behavior is already
screwed up, and where it is acting randomly.  To me it appears that
sysinst is corrupting its memory, and that is why it acts randomly
and eventually fails.

Hopefully someone will look at the bug report and take a look at sysinst
to see what is up with it.

Thanks again
Bolo -- Josef T. Burger