Ubuntu :: Rc.local Doesn't Work As Advertised?

8.04 on a Lippert PC104, no xwindows. This is a little computer intended to just run one program headless in an instrument i am developing. I would like to run this one program from boot.The obvious answer is to add the program to rc.local followed by an &. This doesn't work.I have tried adding all sorts of things to rc.local including mkdir, touch, echo etc etc. the only utility that works is 'touch' which tells me that rc.local is getting executed.I tried creating a new service called local and putting that in rc2.d as priority 80 using rc-update.d. again, only touch worked. so i tried adding sleep 10 and running the utilities as daemons and still they won't run (except touch /var/lock/local).