> After rebuilding nfactotum and > starting it in a fresh window, > I'm able to login to all of the previously tried remote > hosts.
For the reference of future search engines I have a guess on what you might have been seeing. If in the original window, you had attempted to run ssh with an instance of the older factotum bound to /mnt/factotum, then the tunnel that got started would be running with that one. Because the tunnel is persistent, running a new factotum wouldn't have affected the existing tunnel. Opening a new window created a new name space where the tunnel wasn't bound to /net, so ssh started a new one, and this time the new factotum was bound to /mnt/factotum so the tunnel is using it. BLS