Wow! You guys are fast. Two replies in less than 5 minutes!

Customized kernel... I was affraid of that. Of course like all things linux I have been scouring the web for answers. Basically I have found two:

1. don't do it like that, instead make it a daemon
2. make a custom kernel that drops straight to a shell

I'm really frustrated by this. It should not be that hard to just auto-login. I understand the security implications, but this is an embedded system like the empeg and simply does not need security.

Anyway thanks for the input, I'll keep looking and I'll have a look at the empeg kernel source and see if I can figure out anythin there...

--Steve