We never did that (yes, we were a large shop, over 50 servers
and over 1000 desktops). Too easy to make a fatal typo when logged in
as root. We'd only "su -" to root when needed and exit root as soon as
possible.

I'm sure that's not the way things are universally done, but it is how
we did it.

> where the command su winniewillie will let you login in has him. He then can
take you
> threw the exact same steps that created his problem. Most of which were
waking up that

In this situation, always try he su with a "-" switch first ("su -").
This causes the user's login scripts to be executed, and lets you see
if they are the problem. If they are, then you might want to do an
"su" without the "-" and try to fix the problem as that user.

BTW, if you really want a root shell in Ubuntu, you can always do a
"sudo -s", which starts a root shell. Just be very careful doing this,
and exit root as soon as possible. Or don't do it at all, that's what
many people prefer, sudo for everything, much safer.