Oh, yeah -- almost forgot.  Nixing the last line of syslog.conf did
indeed fix the error messages clobbering the screen under X.  I thought
I'd tried all the combinations, but that last line was really the
problem.  Guess I quit experimenting too soon.  Thanks, Bill!  All I
had to do then was figure out why my logins were being refused (the
original perpetrator of the error message)...

And as a side note (didn't see this in the FAQ, but then it's not
likely that your home NetBSD'er will run into this often.  It requires
the ability to telnet in through the Ethernet port :) BSD's method
of preventing root from making a telnet connection to the system is
to omit "secure" from the appropriate terminal line in /etc/ttys.  For
example, all the telnet connections came in on /dev/ttyp* in my setup,
so you have to add "secure" to any of the ttyp* terminal descriptions in
/dev/ttys that are likely to see a connection.  The man pages are a
bit obscure on this, though they have enough info to figure out how
to do it, once you know what you need to do. :-)

-- 
| Greg Dunn                       | I really think it's better this  |
| GregDunn@aol.com                | way; the more you suffer, the    |
| gregdunn@indy.net               | more you show you really care.   |
| http://members.aol.com/gregdunn |                The Offspring     |