Why would a flakey wireless connection cause login problems for a specific tty without affecting others? Why would the wireless connection affect local logins at all? These and many other questions may never be answered but at least the problems have a solution. If login problems weren’t enough the NFS mounts I had were causing hangs during shutdown.

My wireless is still not quite fixed. The underlying problem is that Wifi has suddenly gotten very crowded near my house. Even better, even though I have numerous networks causing interference for me none of them are close enough where i can leach off of them! :)