I've had this happen before, and it was always a problem with the default
shell.  I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that his csh is core
dumping for some reason.

Dave B

> On Thu, Jan 18, 2001 at 04:19:34AM -0800, Ryan Low wrote:
> > I just installed NetBSD 1.5 on an old Pentium I
> > dinosaur from cdrom. Installation completes and
> > everything is smooth until I try to log in for the
> > first time. At the login prompt, having received the
> > root name and password, it thinks for a little bit,
> > then puts up another login prompt. Note that it does
> > not reject the user/pass, but just spits out another
> > prompt. The thing is, I logged in just fine after the
>
> No "Login incorrect" message ?
>
> > first time I installed. Much to my regret, however, I
> > decided to re-install and change the partitioning
> > scheme (just use the whole disk and accept all the
> > default values). Now, after many re-install attempts
> > with the vain hope that this problem might go away, I
> > am beginning to feel frustrated. Any ideas? I would
> > really like to log in......
>
> Try to log in single user (someone else already told you how to do this :)
> and then try to 'su root'. If the passwd is valod I suspect it can't exec
> root's shell, or something like this.
>