[I'm late catching up with this, so if its all been rehashed to death,
just ignore this].

>> Its unfortunate that both sh and ksh use $ENV. Put
>> 
>> if [ x$RANDOM != x$RANDOM ]; then
>> fi

>Like I just told Mr. Woods, this one fails w/ both BASH and zsh and
>any other sh-compatible system that has a working $RANDOM.

Odd, I have had zsh and bash users on several systems with an /etc/profile
that used that trick - I'm not aware that any of them had problems.
This is on SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX and of course NetBSD.

>Thats exactly what I'm talking about. There is simply no reliable way
>to detect what sh one is running.

So file a bug report against bash and zsh.

>Thats why every other shell except ksh uses its own *rc file for
>non-interactive use.

So?  ksh is old - it was there first (cf. zsh and bash) I suspect, 
so if people want to subsume things that it uses they should do so 
in compatible ways.  

Thanks
--sjg