>   Thanks...  I'm going to see if I can make the cisco stupider or  
> something.  :-)

At a guess, the cisco runs spanning tree by default on all its interfaces.
There will be a 30 second delay after the link changes to up before the port
goes into the forwarding state, by which time the Sun has timed out (the link
must be changing down then up during the boot process).  You can make the
cisco not do this by disabling the spanning tree forwarding delay on that
port:

  conf t
  int f0/x	# relevant interface here
  spanning-tree portfast
  end
  wr

J

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