Well, were the ulimit settings wrong, or not? Your assumption that
AOLserver is crashing is still unfounded, for all the same reasons I
explained above. If you fix the 'ulimit -c' setting and then see
AOLserver leaving a corefile, then you would actually know
that it is in fact crashing. And more importantly, you could run gdb
on it to see where and perhaps even why it's crashing.
Didn't you try that already, above on Nov. 27? So, do you see a
corefile now, or not?