I fixed my issue. I demoted the OpenBSD 4.4 machine so the 4.8 one took over as CARP master, downed pfsync0 on both machines and now the 4.8 box is happily passing tons of packets. It was pfsync0 that was messing up 4.8 even with defer: off it was struggling.
Going to test it for about a week, then upgrade the remaining 4.4 box to 4.8. Thank goodness it wasn't a hardware issue. Tom
