When Terminal.app hangs on launch

Every once in a while on an OS X client or server machine, opening a new shell window in Terminal.app either takes a very long time or never gets to a command line prompt (never meaning more than 10 minutes, at which point I give up). When in this state, it happens every time, and my main recourse is to reboot the machine (via the GUI which still seems to work fine).
The last time this happened I also tried to log in to a command line from another machine using SSH. Again, after typing in my password for SSH, the window just sat there--no prompt showed up. Also, I tried to use Terminal.app's "New Command..." and put in "ls" (running without a shell) to see if anything would happen. No--it just hung also.
I was wondering how to troubleshoot this issue. Not being a big UNIX honcho, I don't know what could be going wrong: either the term settings have gone bad, or Terminal can't read .bashrc, .bash_profile or other startup scripts, or those startup scripts are hanging. Perhaps access to the logging in user's home directory has been broken or something else?
I wonder if anyone out there has spent enough time when this happens to figure out what has gone wrong, or if there is some way I could troubleshoot it myself, using some magic way to start up Terminal without invoking startup scripts or using other term settings. How would one go about finding out what the problem is if you can't use Terminal.app or SSH?

hello i have experienced this problem today too on our xserve as i was trying to log in remotely via SSH. after entering password, nothing. very frustrating as this should not be happening especially on a server. i had to physically log in at the console and reboot the server in order to get functionality restored. i notice quite old discussions on this topic so i don't understand why it hasn't been resolved with some update. the xserve is running 10.6.1 and i notice 10.6.2 is out. will of course run the update and hope that this has been fixed.

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