[Sunhelp] Cron weirdness

[fluteplayer]

Ok, this one has me stumped. 

The cron daemon has two strange symptoms.

1) The rc2.d startup script will only start the daemon during bootup. I can
not manually run this script and have cron run. I have to resort to
/usr/sbin/cron. 

2) The crontab entries are not firing. I can watch the cron log and watch
the cron daemon execute the entries one by one. But, no real process is ever
spawned. Each cron execution gets an rc=1. This condition applies to all
users including root. 

E4000 box running Solaris 2.6 in and NIS environment. Strange and very
strange. 

Any ideas,...criticisms, light from above ...?