> I prefer simplicity myself. Apps should read the file on startup, once
> in all likelyhood. If you are worried that you might have edited the
> file and that something might read it partially, move the file into
> place (though I doubt this is going to be much of aproblem.)

The problem Luke was trying to avoid was having to restart all
programs that  had been started before a change was made to
nsswitch.conf 

Parsing the file for each access would be a tad wasteful, so 
Luke's option 4, sounds cool.

--sjg