I have installed fam, portmap and courier-imap:

$ chkconfig --list | egrep '(fam|courier|portmap)'
courier-authdaemon        0:off  1:off  2:off  3:on   4:off  5:on   6:off
courier-imap              0:off  1:off  2:off  3:on   4:off  5:on   6:off
courier-imap-ssl          0:off  1:off  2:off  3:off  4:off  5:off  6:off
courier-pop               0:off  1:off  2:off  3:off  4:off  5:off  6:off
courier-pop-ssl           0:off  1:off  2:off  3:off  4:off  5:off  6:off
fam                       0:off  1:off  2:off  3:on   4:off  5:on   6:off
portmap                   0:off  1:off  2:off  3:on   4:off  5:on   6:off
        fam:                off

I use FAM mainly for courier-imap. I do not have NFS mounts. 

The problem is, that FAM relatively often does not start up. During system start
up FAM relatively often (around 50-80% of cases) does not start and logs the
following message in /var/log/messages:

Sep 28 10:02:15 chemnitz fam[5045]: can't register with portmapper.

But portmap is started some seconds before (from /var/log/boot.msg):

Starting RPC portmap daemondone
<notice>startproc: execve (/usr/sbin/fam) [ /usr/sbin/fam -t 4 -T 0 -L ], [ CONS
OLE=/dev/console ROOTFS_FSTYPE=ext3 TERM=linux SHELL=/bin/sh ROOTFS_FSCK=0 LC_AL
L=POSIX INIT_VERSION=sysvinit-2.85 REDIRECT=/dev/tty1 COLUMNS=128 PATH=/sbin:/us
r/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/lib/klibc/bin vga=791 RUNLEVEL=5 PWD=/ SPLASHCFG= PREVLEVE
L=N LINES=48 HOME=/ SHLVL=2 splash=silent SPLASH=no ROOTFS_BLKDEV=/dev/hdb6 _=/s
bin/startproc DAEMON=/usr/sbin/fam ]
Starting File Access Monitoring Daemondone

But of course, FAM does not run.

This problem is new in SuSE Linux 10.0 RC1. I had not this problem before the
update (old system: SuSE Linux 9.3).