hmmm... let's just put it down to "pilot error"...
what I was seeing (and can no longer replicate :) ) was that ns_thread begindetached would be called and return without error, exactly as I expected it to, and nothing untoward would show up in the server error log, but the script specified for the new thread to run would not be run...
what I'm seeing now is that ns_thread begin and ns_thread begindetached both work fine, but will not see procs that were defined after server startup through OACS's file watching feature... and that I can live with...
