OK--
 I spent entirely too much time on this today, but I seem to have gotten
something stable. I resetted the PRAM about a billion times, patched
System Disk so that /chaos/control (onboard video) would sync, removed
some of the RAM and plugged the disk into the "STD SCSI" controller
instead of "FAST SCSI". I.e. I'm now plugged into esp0 instead of mesh0,
which should be slower but I haven't quite felt it.

 The RAM doesn't quite seem to be -the- problem, but is -a- problem.
When plugged into esp0, the kernel would fail to recognize my disk sd0
when I had 160mb in, but when I removed the 128mb it finds it perfectly.
But even with just the 32mb, it still doesn't want to boot every time
from the fast scsi controller.

 Either way, this seems to be an acceptable solution. Thanks for all the
help.

-Claudio