So, despite me assuring Dan that nothing could possibly go wrong, the commit to source /etc/profile rather than individual files in /etc/profile.d (http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=pacman.git;a=commitdiff;h=0e0a8461) has caused a problem. See FS#11179 (http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/11179) for more details. Xavier and I are stuck as to what is actually causing this problem. The guilty script being sourced is /etc/bash_completion.d/modules and specifically the "type modules" statement at the top. What we don't understand is that this file is being sourced under both methods and why it is causing problems only with one. Even more confusing, the way it gets sourced in /etc/profile is essentially the way makepkg used to do it (loop over /etc/profile.d/* files). A work-around is to add "set +e" and "set -e" on either side of the "source /etc/profile" call. That is probably a good idea anyway as that sourcing should probably not inherit the "-e" property. But can anyone explain why we now need this? Very confused, Allan