I'm a novice UNIX/Solaris user at best, so be gentle :-) My premise on Solaris 8: It's my understanding that when a user (let's say "oracle") logs in, the .profile in the user's home directory will "execute". What's happening: When I log in as oracle and run "env" it shows that the environmental variables I set in .profile seem to have worked. Example: export DISPLAY=me.somewhere.com:0.0 But when I try to run xterm to start a session (I ran Xwin32 first) I get an error message saying that it can't output to a null display, or something to that effect. If I then manually type in the export DISPLAY command and try xterm again, it works like a charm. If .profile is not really executing, then why do the env variables show that they are set correctly? I'm a beginner, thanks for any help. Phil

Unless I misread your .profile example, try using two lines in the .profile to get your results. DISPLAY=me.somewhere.com:0.0 export DISPLAY