SpamAssassin Causing Server Startup Failure

["Gene Grimm" <elessar@noi.net>]

During the past couple of days I have noticed log entries showing that
spamassassin's daemon refused connections from spamc on our two mail
servers. Today, our local mail server was so bogged down I was forced to
reset it. When 'initd' got to spamassassin, the server just hung and would
not continue the boot process. I waited for almost five minutes but it
didn't time out or continue. I was forced to mount the drive in another
system without local mail services (only nullmailer) and disable the
/etc/rcX.d/S19spamassassin links for spamd. Just as a precaution, I disabled
spamassassin on the remote server as well. I have not yet tried to simply
turn off spamd in /etc/defaults/spamassassin but have one non-critical
server I can try this in. Unfortunately, I don't quite know how to force a
Debian server to stay in runlevel 1 during the boot process.

If anyone knows why this was happening and/or how to fix it, I would be most
appreciative.