login procedure on UNIX (any difference between root & user)

[patrick.b.hailey]

>In article <1990Jul12.223945.20137 at cadence.com> yhsieh at cadence.cadence.com (Tommy Hsieh) writes:
>   I found a strange thing happened on one of our machines.  If I login as
>root, it gives me the prompt right after the /etc/motd message.  But if I
>login as normal user, it gives me the /etc/motd message and then I have 
>to wait one or two minutes to get the prompt.  

Does the machine mount remote filesystems?  I've seen some of our Suns do
this.  If machine A mounts a fs from machine B, and then looses contact
with B, it 'backgrounds' the mounting tries.  The machine behaves pretty
normally, except it takes *forever* to get your prompt after logging in.
If you go to the console and log in as root, however, all seems normal.
The 'df' command also waits a long time before timing out.

				Thanks awfully,
					Patrick