I asked myself the same questions. That is why I downloaded the cvs to investigate it for myself. I will run a "diff" between cvs and version 2.3. Surprisingly, the suggestions that I gave, short of the experimental tcsh suggestions worked for me and others with their default user accounts using bash. Isn't there a way for you to try bash and then implement my suggestions from my link? I have just finished reconfiguring all of my distributions on my computers with the exception that I have gentoo and Linux From Scratch left to change. I had them all pretty much optimized as multimedia systems but because of my intensive involvement with developmental software, I had to make some drastic changes from repartitioning my drives to reconfiguring scripts. Under bash, all my distros rock. Red Hat 7.3, Mandrake 8.2, Mandrake Cooker, Linux From Scratch, and gentoo. I will have answers for you within a day (I hope) of why my suggestions work at all, let alone why they are necessary. One thing I do know for certain, they work 100% under bash as I have not been told different.

digging deep,
altoine