During the startup of cups it appearantly failed because there was a line along 'routes_eth0= "default via ..."' The startup failed because the handling of the /etc/conf.d/net failed. I agree that the above syntax error is wrong, but it shouldn't that severly punished... Reproducible: Always Actual Results: several services won't (re)start with the above bug.
The cupsd init.d script depends on the net init.d script ("use net") so it fails when the conf.d script is bad - please trust me when I say that's a good thing.
I do trust you on that, but should there be a possibility to validate, a configuration before such a small issue breaks a system by preventing a reboot?