hello. Have you tried running a ktrace on the sendmail process, and its children, to see where things are getting stuck? One other test I can think of is to connect to your ISP's smtp port using openssl from the bad sparc machine and see if you can start up a ssl session using the s_client command. This should tell you whether or not openssl is the problem or if it's somewhere else. Yet another idea is to verify that DNS resolution is working for the the afflicted host, by using dig and the always useful sendmail -bt interface. With these tests in hand, you should have a much better idea of what's actualy going on.
-thanks -Brian
