I'm having problems on a seemingly simple issue. I want to kick off a script on autologon at runlevel 5.

The autologon is taken care of and not an issue at this point.

I don't want to start a daemon in the background so rc.local and rc5.d aren't that useful to me, so that leaves ~/.xinitrc script.

I'm running RH 3.0 Enterprise.

I have it in the user's home directory and I have the user owning it and the permissions are 777 (just in case).

I have "#!/bin/bash" at the top.

The same works for suse, but it's not working for RH (except I didn't need #!/bin/bash)

Any thoughts?

Normally, ~/.xinitrc is only used when starting the X server by issuing "startx". If using a display manager ("graphical login"), try ~/.xsession

Some distro's don't take this difference seriously...

Thanks for your help, that led me in the right direction!!

The way that the .xsession file works is that window manager must be final thing to execute.

So I just made a script chaining a lot of commands together and had that execute before the WM.