Unable to boost maxusers in custom kernel.

[Worth Bishop]

Running FreeBSD 4.3 (I know - upgrade on the way, but would like to know 
what's going on here for future ref), on AMD Athlon MP 1600 (1393.79-MHz 
686-class CPU) with 1.5 Gb RAM. Ran up against 'too many files' problem, 
dropped packets, maxing out mbuf's, proc files, etc.

Attempted to compile custom kernel based on GENERIC only by changing 
maxusers from 32 to (first) 512, then 256, then 128. No matter what, system 
rebooted with 32 maxusers, 4096 mbugs, 1024 max mbuf clusters, 1024 
maxfiles. Can reset maxfiles via sysctl, but why won't maxusers stick?

Have tried building both with:

#  /usr/sbin/config MYKERNEL
#  cd ../../comple/MYKERNEL
#  make depend
#  make
#  make install
#  reboot

and with

#  cd /usr/src
#  make buildkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL
#  make installkernel KERNCONF=MYKERNEL
#  reboot

No discernable error messages.

What am I missing?

Thanks!