mmccarn, thanks, I followed that thread's suggestion but that didn't solve my problem. e-smith goes up and down all day long, up for a second, then down, then up for a second, then down. I can tell it is doing this because it write a separate set entries to the error_log each time it cycles.
micropitt, I don't know about the PHP module. Everything in e-smith was working fine until I let the system update the installed RPMs just before I started this thread. After a re-config and reboot, no dice.
The user problem started before I updated the software, I'm guessing when I changed the name of the LDAP directory. Could that change be the cause of my problems in the user system? It seems like a possibility.
Anyway, I am becoming discouraged by the difficulty of troubleshooting the problem and I am considering nuking the whole install and going to Ubuntu. I'm not using the mail server, firewall, directory server (except for access to the machine itself), DNS or DHCP. All I really need is a LAMP stack and Samba shares. My only challenge is migrating a big chunk of files from here to another install.