Hard disk problem? kdm bug? What is going on here...

[Ashley Moran]

The last two days I've had freezes when booting up my old 6-STABLE/i386 
desktop.  It gets as far as kdm (3.5.2) which then freezes.

When I reboot into single user mode and after I've fscked the disk (or 
apparently something that sounds very similar) I can't start bash:

# bash
/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libintl.so.6" not found, required 
by "bash"

However, the file exists and gettext, which also depends on the library, still 
runs!  Forcing a recompile of gettext fixes bash.

However, I only noticed this as a side effect of kdm hanging (simply because 
the first thing I do when I want to work in SU mode is mount -a && bash).  
First time it happened I recompiled bash and kdm started; this morning I 
tried it and kdm hung again.  I rebooted and sure enough bash was complaining 
about libintl.so.6, so this time I disabled kdm, recompiled gettext and did a 
startx after booting into multi-user mode.  Works fine.  fsck is reporting no 
errors on /usr/local (dev/ad0s1e)

I'm stumped - I can't work out what the connection is between the symptoms.  
Any ideas anyone?

Thanks
Ashley