emacs on freebsd 5.3

[Tony Tung]

Hi,

I have an unusual problem I was hoping someone could help me with.  I have 
a FreeBSD 5.3 server that's been up for longer than a month.  In that 
period, everything seemed fine.  However, all of a sudden, I'm no longer 
able to spawn a shell in emacs.  In fact, I cannot start any process 
(shell, gdb, grep, compile) inside emacs.  It is happening to all the 
users, which makes me wonder if there's some OS-related issue in play 
here.

I've tried restarting emacs, bypassing the emacs startup file, 
reinstalling emacs, and just about everything I could think of short of 
restarting the server (don't want to do that until I'm physically 
present).

Any ideas or advice would be welcome.

Thanks!
Tony