When I try to start an Exim daemon with -bd it crashes. I ran a debugger and discovered that the crash is happening in the function getservbyname(). What's going on?

What have you got in the file /etc/nsswitch.conf? If it contains this line:

services:       db files

try removing the db. Your system is trying to look in some kind of database before searching the file /etc/services, and there is an incompatibility the is causing the function getservbyname() crash. This is an OS problem. See, for instance: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=129025 Another workaround in Exim is to set

daemon_smtp_port = 25

in the configuration, to stop Exim calling getservbyname().