[ale] lost runlevel

[matthew at nas.nasa.gov (Matthew Avery)]

If I run X windows, then exit, login as root and issue
the reboot command I get a message indicating that 
init doesn't know what run level it's in then the machine
reboots without doing all of the good shutdown stuff like
syncing the disk etc.  I work around this by issuing 
'telinit 5' before 'reboot' and everything shuts down 
correctly.  Does anyone know why this is happening?

Thanks,

-Matt-