Problems with su SOLVED!

[Mike Goertz]

Check that whatever shell you have specified in /etc/passwd has the necessary
permissions, check all the way back to the root directory.  I have also seen
this behavior when the login shell in passwd was a script, in these cases we
handled it by changing the login shell to /bin/sh and logged in once, after
that we could change it back to the script and it worked fine.