... services specified in rc.conf not starting automatically ...

[walt]

Joe wrote:
> Good morning,
> I am really puzzled by this problem and any suggestions would be much
> appreciated.
> 
> It seems that not all of the services I've set to be started, specified
> in the /etc/rc.conf file, are started...

This is just my quick guess -- I haven't read your debugging output yet.
What happens if you put the startup scripts here instead:
/usr/pkg/etc/rc.d