I bet the cause is this:

Your xterm file has the setuid bit set, which causes ld.so to
ignore the LD_LIBRARY_PATH and therefor not find libraries.
Did you setup ld.conf for ldconfig?  Try "ldd xterm" also.

Stephen Eastman writes:
 > Well I'm starting to narrow it down:  It seems that X bombs when I try to
 > start it with certain apps including an Xterm.  I can  start and run X fine
 > with only xclock and twm running, but these seem to only work if I have
 > rebooted _after_ X bombing out from trying to run xterm.  I'm getting a
 > feeling that the libraries are loading in memory, are somehow corrupted by
 > Xterm or Xcalc (the apps that have bombed so far) and thus I can't start X 
 > again, (even after I've removed the offending apps from my xinit file),
 > until I reboot. I have seen fragments of errors regarding ld.so, but they
 > are broken up and not explicit. I thought initially that  I had bad
 > libraries or maybe ld.so was bad, but I've  installed the 1.3 as well as
 > the 1.3.2 binaries and the same thing happens. I'm wondering if I have some
 > bad memory.  How good is the post memory test on a 3/80, will it actually
 > tell you if memory is bad?
 > 
 > Thanks for all the help
 > 
 > Stephen 
 > 
 > seastman@uswest.net
 > ----------
 > > From: Stephen Eastman <seastman@uswest.net>
 > > To: Netbsd Sun3 Mailing list <port-sun3@netbsd.org>
 > > Subject: X on a 3/80
 > > Date: Sunday, March 21, 1999 4:18 PM
 > > 
 > > I am new to netbsd-sun3 and have a 3/80 with 12 megs of RAM running off
 > of
 > > NFS on a mac netbsd box.
 > > Everything in command line mode runs great, but when trying to run X, 
 > the
 > > root window comes up, and then I get the message: "waiting for X server
 > to
 > > shut down" and then back to the command prompt.  Most of the time, no
 > error
 > > messages, (Although maybe twice, I have seen something like 'no fpu
 > > support' but of course the fpu is detected upon boot up)  Other than
 > that,
 > > nothing but the message stated above. (I did a 'startx >& startx.log and
 > > got nothing else).  I am wondering if X requires any tweaking: I noticed
 > > that there are no .Xresources or .Xmodmap files which are referenced in
 > > xinitrc. Do I need to create these and populate them?  I know it's xinit
 > > itself that's failing rather than any apps, because I created an empty
 > > ~/.xinitrc and it still bombed.  Running just the server brings up the
 > root
 > > window fine with mouse support.  I can even run xdm without any problem. 
 > 
 > > 
 > > Any ideas?
 > > Stephen Eastman
 > > seastman@uswest.net
 > >