Not an elegant solution, or one that sheds any light on
the nature of the problem, but this process worked for me:

1)  Removed everything from the default run level except for
     the system logger and net.eth0 .

2)  Rebooted and started nfs by hand successfully after the
     reboot.  Added nfs to the default run level.

3)  Repeated steps 1) and 2) for each additional program I
     wanted to add the the default run level.  Everything seems
     to work fine now.

John Blinka