Yes, it's consistently this error.

This is on kernel 2.6.22.x The previous incarnation would have been on, 2.6.20.x

After making the post I went for the eliminate everything one by one approach. I tried the dev branch of nginx instead of stable, same thing. I installed Lighttpd, let it spawn its own fcgi processes, that worked. I spawned a process myself for nginx just from cmd line from the binary and that worked.

So what ended up working for me is I used the spawn script from Lighttpd for nginx. It's odd though, because the Lighttpd one and the one I used, which comes from http://blog.kovyrin.net/ are almost identical to each other.

It's fixed for my purposes, but if you want me to try anything else I can.