Bad interaction between Ultrix and 4.3 machines - nothing to do with X itself. My .login has something like this in it: switch ( "`tty`" ) case "*ttyp*": case "*ttyq*": case "*ttyr*": case "*ttys*": case "*ttyt*": if ( $TERM =~ xterm* && -f /usr/public/keepalive ) then ( keepalive & ) endif breaksw endsw