I found an issue with the kernel side of these patches
that caused the server not to advertise any services
if the server was restarted. The problem was nfsd_version
array was getting NULL-ed out which meant server would
not advertise any services if restarted. Here is the diff
of the changes. The complete patches are attached.

diff -u linux-2.6.11/fs/nfsd/nfssvc.c linux-2.6.11/fs/nfsd/nfssvc.c
--- linux-2.6.11/fs/nfsd/nfssvc.c       2005-03-18 08:39:53.000000000 -0500
+++ linux-2.6.11/fs/nfsd/nfssvc.c       2005-03-31 11:54:12.000000000 -0500
@@ -77,10 +77,11 @@

  #define NFSD_MINVERS    2
  #define NFSD_NRVERS 
(sizeof(nfsd_version)/sizeof(nfsd_version[0]))
+static struct svc_version *nfsd_versions[NFSD_NRVERS];
  struct svc_program             nfsd_program = {
         .pg_prog                = NFS_PROGRAM,          /* program 
number */
         .pg_nvers               = NFSD_NRVERS,          /* nr of 
entries in nfsd_version */
-       .pg_vers                = nfsd_version, /* version table */
+       .pg_vers                = nfsd_versions,        /* version table */
         .pg_name                = "nfsd",               /* program name */
         .pg_class               = "nfsd",               /* 
authentication class */
         .pg_stats               = &nfsd_svcstats,       /* version table */

At this point I believe I've address the two main issue
that were brought up 1) The need for -V flag to specify
a version 2) Changed the /proc/fs/nfsd/threads to
/proc/fs/nfsd/config.

These patches do fix a pretty obvious bug plus makes the server
much more configurable which I believe is a good thing so I
do hope these patches will be (re)considered for inclusion the
upstream kernel and nfs-utils....

steved.