Holy guana Batman!

Just for a wild guess, I'ld say that setting the sysname is screwing over your
namespace.  The only place that I see the namespace changed after init starts is
the newns() in its main().  /lib/namespace includes at its end:

. /lib/namespace.local
. /lib/namespace.$sysname

Could it be that you have a /lib/namespace.blah that is blowing things
away?