Ok Guys,
I humbly apologise for not working this out from day one :-)
The problem was that I'd mounted the device after fstab from the desktop and SuSE in
this configuration appears to prevent shell scripts from being fired off. If I mount
everything in fstab at boot time then it all works.
Don't know whether this is a general SuSE thing or whether it is just a
"feature" of the version that I'm running (8.2).
Well, you live and learn don't you :-)
Chears and thanks for all of the advice, through which I learn't stuff so it
wasn't all that bad.
Robin