If I'm reading condor.boot.rpm correctly, your patch calls ps with no arguments and searches the output for a line starting with the condor_master's pid. I see two problems. First, if ps is called with no arguments, it won't include condor_master in its results. Second, if a pid is less than 5 digits long, ps adds spaces in front of it. This would cause your patch to not notice the condor_master's pid.
I asked Scot K to look at this patch, hopefully he'll have time next week. It would be nice if the script also handled the case where pids have wrapped, and another process is using the old master's pid.
-greg