Boot process hanging after local [cupsd problem?]

[jsnorman]

EDIT - I have found the culprit, and a temporary workaround, to the problem below. Basically:
1) When I boot cupsd hangs on exec from the rc script sequence (/etc/init.d/cupsd)
2) The boot process hangs waiting for cupsd to return (I guess - there is no error message and strangely no timeout, ever)
3) xdm will load okay thankfully, and I can open a root terminal and explicitly kill the /etc/init.d/cupsd process, and followed by /etc/init.d.cupsd restart - and again strangely, it works fine
4) After killing and restarting cups, boot process finishes and my login prompts finally appear in vt0 - vt6

WHY????

ORIGINAL POST:

I have had my gentoo system (~amd64) up and running with minimal downtime for almost a year. I regularly emerge updates, sometimes with disastrous effects, but always have been able to fix the problem .. this one has me stumped.

When I boot, I can see all processes starting ok, all the way through stage 3. There are no unusual messages or errors that I can see. I have inspected the system logs to the best of my knowledge they all appear fine, nothing crashing, no errors, nothing in faillog, dmesg, or kernel logs that would be unusual.

However, on vt0 through vt6, after local is started, my login prompt never appears and it seems like everything is just hanging.

If I have xdm loading, it will load so at least I can use the computer through X, but my vt's appear to be hosed. Without X starting in the boot sequence, the system is unusable because there is not login prompt, no error, and no way to get to a shell.

Here is the really strange part - if I choose "Interactive" and just manually start EVERY process, my login prompt appears and everything is groovy.

I am also not sure WHEN this started happening. I rarely reboot, so I have done dozens of updates over 3 months or so without rebooting (I just restart the needed services instead). I only reboot this time to upgrade to the new kernel release; but using the old kernel image I now have the same issue.

Without errors, I just do not know where to look. Anyone seen anything like this before?

Jeff

EDIT - Here are the services I have running in the init scripts:

[Keruskerfuerst]

Maybe you should try to use AMD64 instead of ~AMD64.
I have a computer running a stable Gentoo 2006.0 with AMD64.

[jsnorman]

Alas, when I started with gentoo, the stable branch was completely unusable for amd64. It only recently (this year) became good enough to use, but all my systems are ~amd64 and I do not have the time to rebuild the os and world with stable (and believe me, you cannot simply modify ~amd64 -> amd64 followed by emerge -e system; that way lies disaster).