D       Marks a process in disk (or other short term, uninter-
                        ruptible) wait.
   
   Is this esp.c hanging up on me again? The curious thing is that I've just
   made a current kernel with no hanging, I suspect the what that X11R6's
   method of build is tickling a bug in the esp.c disk driver.

maybe, but, i've recently built R6pl12 twice on my sparc without a
problem like this.