Working in the public health system, I can empathise with your frustrations about lack of captial for new computers. Depending upon the hardware you're using, it always pays to keep a spare BSD box handy for fixing up these kind of problems. I've resliced and attempted to recover Solaris disks from BSD without too much hassale.
It is very unsafe to do anything to your disk unless you make a backup copy using dd (I can elaborate more here, but for the purposes of berevity I won't). As far as I know, there is no safe way to shrink a UFS filesystem. You can only shrink by copying files to a smaller slice. I know that I haven't really answered your question, but I tend to think that the answer is specific to the resources which are at your disposal (NFS drives, spare drives, SCSI or IDE). Robbie -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
