After a lot of debugging (and total ignorance on my part), I think it's 
conclusive that in reality it was my Kensington 2 button mouse that was 
panicing netbsd.  After removing that (and switching to ole faithful), 
the machine will boot to single-user.  Can anyone point me at a URL that 
tells me what to do from there?  I have tried booting to multi-user, and 
the machine seems to hang where it checks the filesystem.  Also I have 
noticed that it gives me a "read-only filesystem" error when i try to do 
much of anything in single-user mode.  Is there something i'm doing wrong?

Many thanks for the big help!

Michael Donovon Peters

P.S.  How long is the filesystem check when booting to multi-user mode 
supposed to take?

Obligatory cute .sig here