To follow up on this, I reported the problem upstream to the autofs
developers, received confirmation that this is indeed a bug, and today
received a patch which fixes the problem. I've recorded this info in
bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=122162
If it turns out that it's too close to FC2 to get this fixed, I'll
gladly offer patched packages to anyone else who hits this bug.
- J<