Syncer "giving up" on buffers

Hello,

I have a problem with kernels,  built the last couple of days, where
during shutdown syncer is "giving up" on buffers.  During the next boot
all filesystems are checked because of improper dismount.  Here follow
the exact messages I get:

  Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `vnlru' to stop...stopped
  Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `bufdaemon' to stop...stopped
  Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `syncer' to stop...stopped
  
  syncing disks, buffers remaining... 8 8 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 
  giving up on 6 buffers
  Uptime: 41m20s
  pfs_vncache_unload(): 1 entries remaining
  Shutting down ACPI
  Rebooting...

After some testing I found out that this does _not_ happen if I manually
unmount my ext2 filesystems, before shutting down.  In this case syncer
finishes without any problems.

My last kernel which did not have this problem, is the one I built on
Wed Aug 27 23:14:12 EEST 2003.

The output of dmesg from the verbose boot of the kernel, can be found
here:

  http://members.hellug.gr/lefcha/dmesg.out 

Thanks