digitalvoid:
Sorry. I didn't notice you had already posted the answers to the two questions I reposted.

I thought this might be a clue. I figured DOS line endings instead of unix line endings might be causing problems for the upstart loader. So I checked.

I copied the file from my post above into a file on my windows machine. Then I scp'ed that copy to /etc/event.d/lighttpd. The size of my original /etc/event.d/lighttpd was 170 characters. The windows created one was 180 characters. That makes sense: 170 original chars plus 10 extra line ending chars. So far, so good.

Then I rebooted... and lighttpd was live. It still works with DOS line endings.

So that doesn't appear to be the problem.

I'm out of ideas.

Please. Someone else try this. We have two contradictory results and need a wider trial base.