[Dovecot] dovecot crashes on start

[Timothy]

Hello,

I wasn't able to find anything about this on the site that could give me 
a definite answer, but when I start dovecot it dies immediately.  The 
following is left in the logs.

dovecot: Oct 06 20:59:30 Info: Dovecot starting up
dovecot: Oct 06 20:59:32 Error: Auth process died too early - shutting down
pop3-login: Oct 06 20:59:32 Fatal: fd_send(-1) failed: Broken pipe

I thought this might have something to do with chrooting so I tried to 
disable all of that in the configuration.  After that did not work I 
rebuilt dovecot with minimal configure options (compared to what I used 
originally) and used a stock configuration changing only the certificate 
locations so that dovecot would not complain about the certificates 
missing, still no luck and the same error.  I've tried using strace on 
dovecot but it seems like it hardly ever hangs/dies at the same point. 
I'm trying to run this on a slackware 9.0 linux based machine.  Any 
suggestions?

Timothy,

-- 
I put instant coffee in a microwave and almost went back in time.
		-- Steven Wright