[Dovecot] Dovecot failing silently on startup

[Julian Melville]

 > Can you do an strace of a running dovecot process so we can 
> get a better idea?  (You ought to cc the list as well.)

Sorry for the slow reply, it's taken me a few days to get back to this
and observe the problem again. I've placed a tarball of the output of
"strace -ff -o dovecot dovecot" here:

  http://rimu.tiddly-pom.com/dovecot-strace.tar.gz

To my (admittedly untrained) eye, it's looking for and not finding
/etc/ld.so.nohwcap, and then repeatedly not finding
/var/run/dovecot/ssl-parameters.dat. At that point there is a
/var/run/dovecot/ssl-parameters.dat.tmp - is that where the SSL stuff is
being generated?

Is it just that Dovecot is stalled until the ssl-parameters.dat file
appears?

Thanks,

Julian.