Out of memory while booting? update

[Charles G Montgomery]

A (lack of) progress report on my boot attempt failures.  Feel free 
to ignore.

Memory and drive tests found no problems.  The tech at Compucare was 
reluctant to try replacing parts he didn't have on hand without a 
better idea of what the problem was, which is reasonable.  I 
brought the machine home and have been trying things, but learning 
little.

Booting single-user fails in the same way as a regular boot.
I can get a shell with "init=/bin/sh".  From the shell I can fsck 
the file systems and mount and unmount.  I can also run almost all 
the scripts in /etc/rc2.d with no problems.  (nfs-common fails 
because of a statd failure.)  I didn't try a few of the 
non-essential ones.

>From the shell, shutdown doesn't work because /dev/initctl doesn't 
exist.  My attempts to RTFM don't tell me much about how init 
actually works.  From the shell (which has pid 1) I 
can "exec /sbin/init" and init starts as during a normal boot, but 
encounters the "Out of memory" disaster.

The problem seems to come during the loading of modules.  One that 
it tries is a touchscreen module, which takes a long time and ends 
in trouble. If I enter a ctl-C while it is trying that, it seems to 
go on to others.  It succeeds with ppp modules.  When it gets to 
some sound modules, again there is a delay, and then errors.  A 
ctl-C (or -D or -Z) doesn't have any effect during the tries.

Is there any way to stop init partway through, so I could at least 
see if unreasonable amounts of memory seem to have been used, or 
look for other information?  Is there some interaction with 
hardware that occurs during module loading but not during other 
activities?  Is there a way to get init to not load modules?
Is there any other information I should try to get?
Any other ideas?

Your interest is appreciated.

cgm