Well, you obviously know your stuff. I got it working by disabling the notification mechanism during new user registration, and just letting people register without the email confirmation.
Evidently, my path to sendmail is not as it seems even though I did a "whereis sendmail" in telnet to get the path. This site is on a virtual server and there may be some hidden paths.
In the meantime, thanks, I got it working. I guess I need to go through and make sure I have not checked to allow any kind of notification or it may happen again on something else.
Thanks for your help,
Bo