An interesting thing occurs upon my booting Slackware 9.1. Boot appears normal to :

Welcome to Linux 2.4.22 (tty1)
dragonflyhost login:

and then out of the clear black a line is added to the login and the cursor blinks several lines below the login line like so:

dragonflyhost login: 040126 18:23:31 mysqld ended



_(blinking cursor) well, really, the cursor is way over here->

Hitting enter brings me back to the normal login and everything works like it's supposed to thereafter.

Apparently it has something to do with MySQL. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

You probably do start MySQL at boot. If you want to run MySQL you have to create systemtables (read mysql documentation) otherwise the MySQL proces won't last very long. That's probably the case when your cursor behaves strange, your MySQL proces is stopping and interfering.
The easiest way is to prevent MySQL from starting at boot. You can do that by removing the execute rights from the rc.mysqld script. chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld

Thanks for the reply. That wasn't the answer to my problem, though. The MySQL rpm package for Redhat supplies some sample databases which are placed in /var/lib/mysql. The MySQL tgz package for Slackware does not contain any sample databases. When I discovered this, I copied some old Redhat Mysql databases to /var/lib/mysql on my Slackware installation and when I rebooted, everything ran normally. So apparently, with Slackware, if you don't have any mysql databases in /var/lib/mysql, your mysql daemon does not survive the boot process.