Thank you to everyone for all of your assistance. I solved the problem, though I’m not sure what the problem was. First, I changed the MP3 directory to point to a single artist’s folder so I had a very small (14) number of songs. That worked perfectly. So, I changed the configuration to point to my entire MP3 library, deleted songs.db, rebooted the NSLU and restarted Firefly . . . . . and it worked.
So now, I’ve got my little NSLU huffing and puffing (I’ve not clipped it’s little resistor yet) and serving up lots of great music. It’s still slow at loading my artist list (20 seconds)….and that’s with an index on artist and album, but that’s acceptable.