I have had issues with programs (notably X under FreeBSD) failing to
start correctly at boot time from rc.local, and kludged around it with
something like

(sleep 60; fooprog &) < /dev/null &> /dev/null &

so that the SIGHUP that happens when the rc process finishes and the
console is revoked (I think) doesn't clobber the process.

I'm not sure what the right answer is.  Arguably daemons should
daemon(3)ize, and then I think this won't happen.

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>