> I had to commmit a bit of evil to avoid a similar warning in some other 
> code on the sparc...If you initialize the variable with "0" or whatever 
> before it's used, the warning will go away...

Yuck.

In the process, you've managed to remove the ability for a purify like
tool to detect an uninitialized variable reference at run time.
(NetBSD might not have such at tool now, but I wouldn't count it out).

	--jtc