[tex-k] Disruptive bug in TeXlive2007 on Solaris

[Karl Berry]

    All tex binaries before doing any useful work start scanning the entire 
    colletion of my filesystems

I speculate that you are running tex as root, and $HOME (= /) is
confusing matters?  Do you have TEXINPUTS set?

Certainly the programs do not in general try to read the entire
filesystem; in fact, they go to great lengths to avoid this exact
scenario, although obviously they are failing :(.

    Please take a look at this problem

Can you please try running
  latex -kpathsea-debug=-1 small2e >&/tmp/mylog
And send me the resulting mylog file?  That should show where the bad
settings are located.  I don't have a useful guess offhand.

Best,
Karl