So I think I figured out the problem. What was happening was that db4 was having issues (don't know what in particular) but it was causing lmtp to hang because lmtp was waiting for the duplicate delivery check to complete and it never did because of whatever issues db4 was having. So I switched the db type for deliver.db to skiplist and now all seems to be working well...
cheers, -- Carl P. Corliss System Administrator / Developer www.xaraya.com