Logging to serial console broken?

Hi all,

For quite a while syslogd has been failing to log messages to a
serial console on my CURRENT system.  Sometimes the date/time part
of a message appears only, sometimes the first letter of the month
only, but mostly nothing appears on the console, albeit logging to
/var/log/messages is OK.  I had used to blame my console null-modem
cable until I tried to restart syslogd.  It began to log to the
console OK when restarted.

Can the serial console be in a special state confusing syslogd
during the boot sequence?  According to fstat, /dev/console isn't
opened by syslogd until restarted, but syslogd complains of no
errors at the boot time even if put in debug mode.  Moreover, it
tells in its debug output it's logging to the console:

  %logger -p user.err test_message
  %tail syslog.out
  logmsg: pri 13, flags 0, from dg, msg Jun 27 14:23:06 yar: test_message
  Logging to CONSOLE /dev/console
  Logging to FILE /var/log/messages
  logmsg: pri 166, flags 17, from dg, msg Jun 27 14:23:06 dg yar: test_message

No such problem seen on the vty console.

Did anybody see anything similar?

-- 
Yar