502 Bad Gateway

[dyna]

> Do you see "104: Connection reset by peer" sometimes or always?
Yes, it's consistently this error.

This is on kernel 2.6.22.x
The previous incarnation would have been on, 2.6.20.x

After making the post I went for the eliminate everything one by one
approach. 
I tried the dev branch of nginx instead of stable, same thing. 
I installed Lighttpd, let it spawn its own fcgi processes, that worked.
I spawned a process myself for nginx just from cmd line from the binary and that
worked. 

So what ended up working for me is I used the spawn script from Lighttpd for
nginx. 
It's odd though, because the Lighttpd one and the one I used, which comes
from http://blog.kovyrin.net/ are almost identical to each other. 

It's fixed for my purposes, but if you want me to try anything else I can.