I was able to fix it by booting from an old rescue disk and following the standard install procedure through the root disk but bailing out to a spare tty as soon as possible. Then I used ae to stick a line with 'exit 0' near the top of /etc/init.d/xfs. After I rebooted, then I removed the xfs package. Now everything is OK.
-- Thomas E. Vaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> CIMMS/NSSL, Norman, OK, USA

