I do agree but at the moment we have a chicken and egg situation -
  venus needs to be answering to provide the stat information but it is
  currently in the kernel doing a mount.  One thing that does occur to
  me is what about venus feeding the stat information into the message
  queue prior to doing the mount call?  Would that work?

That almost seems worse, to send a reply to the question you know is
(probably) going to be asked.  It occurred to me, too, but I think it
is asking for trouble, and at this point having a separate mount
process (by forking, or like arla does it) seems to be the best way
forward.

Thanks for the help on this; fixing this will remove 1 of my 2
problems on NetBSD/coda.  (The other is a kernel panic when writing
files in cfs with plaintext in coda.  I need to set up kgdb anyway for
a project at work, so I'll have a look at this at well.)