hi! I thought i may as well say thanks to all the people who helped me to
get this working. the suggestion that was the most helpful and ultimately
got it working was to fix my .xinitrc. 

it was important to background all apps run, so that they did not stop the
script from proceeding. if i failed to do this, the script would run the
first item on the list then sit and have to be killed from a remote su
login. so all items had to be backgrounded... EXCEPT the last item, which
was twm. I had it the wrong way around. I had twm as the first item and it
was also backgrounded, and it was wrong on both those counts.

I really appreciate all the help i've been getting.

_________________________________________________________________________
John Ostrowick
Computer Science Department, University of the Witwatersrand
1 Jan Smuts Ave, Johannesburg, South Africa. 1st Floor, Senate House 1012
Phone: +27 (011) 716-3783
jon@cs.wits.ac.za or jon@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za or jon@is.co.za
My web page is on my server's: http://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/
My ftp site: ftp://macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za/public partition/
My listserv: subscr@macenroe.cs.wits.ac.za (any message with a body)