On Wed, Jun 06, 2012 at 07:08:59PM -0500, Jonathan E. Brickman wrote: > When I run any terminal emulator for the first time after a reboot, > it takes a long time for Bash to come up, the window is blank for > 10-20 seconds. On a quad AMD X4 with 4G RAM. Started after > updates, don't know which ones. Anyone got a suggestion, or a good > way to diagnose? I've had a similar problem in the past: after a reboot I'd try and log in and the prompt would hang for 10-20 seconds. It ended up being pulseaudio. I disabled autospawn in /etc/pulse/client.conf and it fixed the issue. You might try that? What's in your $TERM's config file? .bashrc, .zshrc, etc. Or, more generally, /etc/profile?