I've tried putting a .bashrc and .bash_profile into my home folder .. no luck. As I said in my post, this behaviour is new to me. For 18 years now up until the latest slackware, whenever I've started a terminal program it has picked up the /etc/profile contents.
Hold the phone ... just tried a .bashrc file again and it's working now. I've never had to use one before. Thanks for the reply.
