I am trying to have NFS "delliver" the /usr to the client computer on boot up. On my client /usr was originally its own parttition (well, in fact, it still is). What I tried to do was edit fstab and have it not mount /usr off the local disk but instead off the server. This is not working. It seems that it needs something on /usr inorder to bring up the NFS system, so the client hangs on boot up. What is the method to get /usr to a client on boot up?

Well you have to realize that /usr is a very important part of your filesystem. I don't think I've really seen anyone mount the whole /usr directory over NFS or NIS for that matter. Most that I've seen are like /usr/local or maybe /usr/local/share, etc.

You could try accomplishing this using NIS along with it but I think you'd probably be better off just making a diskless terminal type server if you want most of your commands or programs to run off another machine or server. Check out this site: www.tlsp.org
I'm sure they might have some hints or tricks to accomplish this or maybe links to other resources in mounting filesystems over NFS or NIS.

What distro is this?

On most systems, there are just too many things in /usr that are needed. Much of X11 is in /usr.

The short answer is that I don't believe you are going to be able to easily do this. Check out the HOWTO on having a NFS root and see if there is something there to help.