"Give root password for maintence" during every boot of system

[Mitchell Laks <mlaks@post.harvard.edu>]

Hi,
I run debian sid. Sometime ago my system began to give me the message

"Give root password for maintainance
or type Control_D to continue "

during reboot of the system. It would occur after the boot messages

starting NFS (... etc)
...
starting sessions
setting console screen modes
initilizing random number generation
setting up X server
setting up ice socket directory

then I would get that cryptic root password mesage stuff mentioned above

Then, 
if I hit C-d 
the systen continues to boot
with 

some messages about needing to add .conf suffix to some configuration files for kvm or something
then
INIT: Entering runlevel 2
starting system log daemon
etc.

So what is causing my system to need to enter Control D?

It is not a failure is fsck checking.

So what is going on?

Thanks,
Mitchell Laks