[RobertGraham]

Jim:

Thanks for the very useful work-around.

In the meantime, I also found the "answer." CheckPoint is very csh based. So I did was the following:

edit .profile to check for the file /usr/bin/csh; then set shell to csh
and changed the line:
. /opt/CPshrd-R61/tmp/.CPprofile.sh to

. /opt/CPshrd-R61/tmp/.CPprofile.csh

once this .profile was sourced, it worked fine. I'm able to start the mds and logout without problem.