Hi guys, firstly i've searched google and here for the answer and have come across nothing that gives me a complete fix, i think i am halfway there as you will see below:

Details:
FC 4 2.6.14-1
Fluxbox
aterm

Problem:
I'm trying to maximise productivity and reduce the amount i have to do manually when logging in, this being said i have a few programs that i want to start up and display in a console when i log in.

As it is i have never had aterm read from the .Xdefaults file (i tried with and without the -ls switch) so therefore i have this command in ~/.fluxbox/startup

That's fine, does what i want it to. Now i want 3 consoles aligned vertically:
1
2
3

when i login, using the fluxbox remember options would keep placing all the aterms in the same place (as they have the same name/path), so i copied the aterm binary and renamed a few different ones:

snortterm - to run snort to catch any alerts
sshterm - to open a prompt to my server i SSH into

adding the above into seperate commands in the startup file works too (they also all have their own entry into ~/.fluxbox/apps for posn etc.). This starts 3 aterms in the positions i want, now they all show the standard prompt.

next i wanted the middle one to show the SSH prompt and the bottom one to show snort alerts. I researched into aterm and saw that using the -e <program> switch starts a console program in the terminal. So i tried putting it in the startup command (pointing to some working shell scripts) , however putting it after the other switches means it doesn't work and putting it before them means all the transparency is gone, which is the problem:

Summary:

I want to have 3 transparent aterms:
1 - standard prompt
2 - SSH prompt
3 - Snort alerts (running a shell script i wrote)

using the above mentioned startup command or indeed fixing aterm so it reads the .Xdefaults file

Note: i have also tried forwarding commands to the terminal program, it just starts the command in the current terminal then opens another

Any help is much appreciated.

Ethics