bash hangs on xterm startup about 1/50 times.

Every once in a while, when I start a new xterm, bash will not give me a prompt. This has happened on different machines, and under the last few SuSE distributions. It's a very minor annoyance, but it's so fundamental to the very concept of Linux/Unix (http://www.unix.org/) that it needs to be addressed. Have other's noticed this? STH