Well, it is definitely a file system issue but of course it won't be an nfs issue if you have a local mount point. I resolved this issue in UNIX by unmounting the file system is question.
I didn't realize how important the . and .. directories are to SAP executables.
In my /usr/sap/<SID> path, only "." showed up in when using the ls -l command with the <sid>adm user.
As root though, the "." and ".." paths were listed.
After unmounting the file system I saw that the path was owned by roo.system.
Changed the file system ownership to <sid>adm:sapsys with full permissions(probably not needed).
All is well... took quite a while to find this... then of course, found OSS note 1917102 which pointed to OSS note 130683 (which had my solution. note title is misleading and I overlooked it at first.)
Hope this saves someone valuable time.
Freddie Cummings