Urban Boquist wrote: 

   Even if it had worked I don't think swapping to an msdos file system 
   is a very good idea because the msdos filesystem is horribly slow. 

           -- Urban

  True, I thought of that. 

However my rationalization was that swaping to a msdos file system must be faster than accessing 
the nfs server and swaping at the same time. 

I just find it hard to believe that accessing a msdos disk would be slower than nfs.  Besides X 
seemed to come up faster with the msdos swap than the nfs, that is, until it crashed. 

It could have been blind optimizm on my part. 

thanks 
jam