No, egg on face time.
It appears that the problem was not the kernel, but the per-process limit
set by lshell.
The default lshell configuration in Debian 2.0 sets a per-process hard
limit of 24 file descriptors. Yes, twenty-four.
No bloody wonder things were starving and the kernel reported everything as
being fine!
I have raised this to 256 (which IMO is a little bit more sane ;) for my
user account.
I'm not sure why root was affected as lshell has it unlimited, but I'll
wager it was a) due to su'ing from my starved user account and/or b) the
very few times the kernel _did_ actually need > inode-max inodes.
Sorry for wasting anybody's time with this stupid stupid red herring.
(and thanks to Stephen Tweedie and Nat Friedman for helping sort it out)
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