NIS crankiness at bootup

Hi folks,
    I've been booting from NIS off a development machine at work and
I've noticed the following behavior:
    1. Booting with nisdomainname, nis_client_enable, nis_client_flags
set at boot makes the machine inaccessible (I have to reboot the
machine, get into singleuser, comment out the vars, and boot again).
    2. Booting with the variables unset, uncommenting them, booting
up, and finally enabling all of the amd and NIS bits works.
    So I was wondering if there was some secret sauce in the mix or
some monkeying that I needed to do (similar to ntpdate to ensure that
the interface is up and functional) to determine that NIS is sane and
functional for use, or is there some option I can specify in
nsswitch.conf to fallback to the system account data)?
Thanks,
-Garrett