Processes respawning too fast...

I have a HD install of Knoppix 3.3 (11-19-03). The first thing I noticed was that the syslog daemon wasn't working. After some investigating, I found that /sbin/syslogd was an empty file. So, I booted up with the CD and copied /sbin/syslogd to /my-hd-install-partition/sbin/syslogd. Now the syslog works properly. I'm not sure why the HD install didn't copy this file properly. Any ideas?

Second, when I try to shutdown, the computer hangs during the shutdown process. One of the consoles has LOTS of messages saying something like:

INIT: "4" respawning too fast. Disabled for 5 minutes...
INIT: "5" respawning too fast. Disabled for 5 minutes...
and on...
and on...

Any ideas on this one?

Thanks,

BR