[texhax] Mysterious hang-up using bibtex.

[Karl Berry]

Hi again Rolf,

Glad the .bst problem is solved, anyway.

    the first time latex is invoked after a reboot the command takes
    several minutes to complete.

I suspect the same culprit: environment variable (mis)settings.  This
time I cannot guess which one.  TEXINPUTS?  TEXFORMATS?  TEXFONTS?
Could be any of those or quite a few others.

I speculate that it is rebuilding the .fmt file on that first run for
reasons undetermined.  But rebooting per se would not affect that (or
anything else about the TeX world I can think of); removing ~/.texlive
would.

    What was that .texlive directory doing?  Where did it come from? 

It's created as a normal part of installation and/or invocation, used to
store per-user recreatable data.  E.g., the luatex font cache,
dynamically generated tfm's, pk's, and fmt's.  Generally speaking, it is
neither necessary nor desirable to remove it, since then whatever is in
it just has to be recreated again.

Good luck,
karl