I can't say that I'm completely confident what all the processes do, but I can shed a little light on things.
cleanipc is run after server shutdown. It cleans up the shared memory segments that the various zone processes use to share data.
There needs to be a zone process for each zone that players are in, and a few idle processes for players to join. Typically zones are dynamic, in that they load the zone data on demand when a player is about to enter it. Zones can also be static, which means that they are always running. This is a good idea for zones that are popular, as they don't have to load and unload all the time.
world co-ordinates the zone processes, and handles the player data.
I'm not sure the exact role of eqlaunch, but I suspect that it is responsible for telling the zone processes to fork.
I have to wonder, have you got shared memory set up right? You have to set some parameters in the /proc filesystem, either by hand, in your startup script, or in your rc.d scripts. Details are found in the wiki.
You might want to check that all relevant folders are owned by whoever is running the server, and that read, execute and write permissions are set for owner and group.
Clean out your log files, and see if you can increase the logging level. Unfortunately there seems to be at least 3 different logging facilities in the server, and I can't tell you how to adjust it sensibly.
You might also want to check if the various .lock* files exist when the server isn't running. They shouldn't be, as they exist to stop you starting the server twice. If you started the server as one user, and it crashed without removing the stale locks, then started the server as another user you would get something like what you are describing.
In the startup sequence, the login-server should be first to run. Make sure you have a little sleep before you start eqlaunch or world, and make sure you arn't starting the servers in the foreground so they block the later processes from starting.
I agree that the documentation is way behind the current server. Perhaps you could document your adventure, so that it is available for other people to benefit from. A guide for gentoo or centos could be useful.
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