fix corrupted system files, 13.5?

[atax1a]

unreadable config files are unlikely to cause the behavior described upthread:

Untarring a release tarball sounds rather "exciting" ....

I've discovered that this mail problem does generate errors in /var/log/messages:

kernel: pid 14496 (mail), jid 0, uid 1001: exited on signal 11

(The `mail` program doesn't crash. It simply returns to the '&' prompt after displaying nothing, instead of a message.)

this sounds to us like mail is segfaulting when it tries to shell out, which leads to either the shell or mail, or one of their dynamic library dependencies being corrupted. but without some kind of comparison against a pristine tree, ideally from a rescue disk, we have no way of knowing.