problems after rebuild of 5.5 stable

[Matthew Pope]

Hello,
I have a bit of grey hair, but I've been blessed with working with 
FreeBSD gurus so much that I am struggling to run my own domain and 
webserver. That is I have have been co-dependant upon FreeBSD gurus in 
the past, so I was lazy. I'm now on my own and finding that 
administering a UNIX system based domain and webserver is rewarding, but 
requires a lot of technical knowledge.

The root of my problem was my 5.4 based system was running out of 
sockets due to a close early problem, and a problem description I read 
in the mailing lists did describe something very close, for which the 
discoverer of the problem provided a patch. Rather than patch, I thought 
it that since it's been a year, it was time to rebuild the kernel with 
the latest STABLE release.  So I did the rebuild as instructed in the 
FreeBSD Handbook.  Now I'm up to 5-5 STABLE using a default kernel 
Generic i386 version.

The mergemaster step following the rebuild and reboot took me for a 
ride. Rather I rode free and easy not quite sure what I was doing.  I 
was not sure exactly which file to go with, and I tended to choose t for 
temp file for many of the prompts.  Now my 5.5 kernel boots, but there 
are a number of messages of the form:
source_rc_confs: not found
$ipnat_enable is not set properly - see rc.conf(5)
$ipfs_enable is not set properly - see rc.conf(5)
etc....

My rc.conf includes:
routed_enable="YES"
router="/sbin/routed"
defaultrouter="10.1.1.1"

I later read in the mailing list that someone had a simliar problem and 
solved it by re-running the mergemaster step.  I tried that too, and 
this time I selected <default> answer to all the prompts about 
conflicts.  I rebooted, but I still cannot even ping my gateway, as I'm 
getting "no route to host".

I tried starting routed manually, but still no routes were discovered.  
I also tried inserting a subroutine into rc.subr that called 
source_rc_confs that did source the rc.confs, and it is called during 
boot I see from /var/messages.  But alas this is a desperate measure, 
there must be something I can do to fix this problem without meddling in 
rc.subr.  So my routing is down, which means my dns is down, and most 
definetely my httpd is down.

Any help in debugging, resolving this poorly executed upgrade would be 
very welcome.
Thanks,
Matthew