The problem was links trying to (successfully) kill off the init
process.  It was all my fault.  A change I made to the select
emulation killed off the 'extra' timer process on atexit.
Unfortunately, I didn't bother to look at the rest of the code
and notice that the rock it was hiding its pid under was
getting set to -1 sometimes (like when some other process
sharing the memory aborted).  So the code was doing a
kill(-1) which means send a note to process group 1.

Fixed two ways.  Select is fixed and /bin/init no longer
lets itself be killed so easily.