8.1: Cron ignoring crontab updates

[patrick]

I recently upgraded a FreeBSD 7.0 system to 8.1-RELEASE (via
freebsd-update) and am experiencing the strangest cron problem I have
ever seen.

My cron jobs run, but if I make any changes to my crontab, cron does
not pick them up; it continues to operate based on the snapshot of
crontabs it loaded when cron was started up. If I restart cron
(/etc/rc.d/cron restart), the changes are then picked up, but again,
any subsequent changes are ignored. I don't see any issues with the
permissions, and when I edit a crontab, it says "crontab: installing
new crontab", and the /var/log/cron log shows BEGIN EDIT, REPLACE, and
END EDIT.

I'm somewhat at a loss to figure out where the disconnect is, and it's
impractical for me to have to restart cron any time any user updates
their crontab. Has anyone come across this?

Patrick