Interesting. Have you tried restarting AOLserver yet?
Instead of using inittab, you might want to look at monit (http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/). monit is "a utility for monitoring and managing daemons or similar programs running on a Unix system. It will start specified programs if they are not running and restart programs not responding"
There's also djb's supervise, but as with every other djb tool, it's non-free, hard to setup and non-intuitive to understand.
-Roberto
