Hmmm...now Tink... I had to laugh at the fact that YOU were the first to eply to your own post...

Sorry man...couldn't resist. :D

The reason your ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile scripts do not get read when you start a terminal is because you most likely have /bin/sh as your login shell. Check your /etc/passwd file. If the last field for your user is left blank then by default you will get /bin/sh as your login shell. On Slack 9.1 /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/bash.
If you read the man page for bash, section INVOCATION it will tell you that in this case bash behaves like the old sh and does not read ~/.bashrc etc. Instead it will look at the value of $ENV variable and use it as the name of the config file.
So, you have two options, either export $ENV and set it to the name of your desired config script such as ~/.bashrc, or specify /bin/bash as the default login shell for your user in /etc/passwd. If you do the latter the ~/.bashrc and the rest will get read. This works for me. Hope it helps.