i thought that runlevel 5 might be unnecessary for a remotely managed server (no monitor connected to box) and experimented with runlevel 3 for the first time. I quickly learned what chkconfig does, but am still bewildered why [root@computer root]$ reboot waits ~10 minutes before rebooting whereas is nearly instantaneous when runlevel=5. I didn' notice much difference in load with runlevel set to 3 or 5. Aside from a pretty screen with runlevel 5 and faster rebooting in my case, is there anything that implies that runlevel 3 is superior to 5?

thx if any ideas, - bp

I sure don't run X on a machine where I never sit at the console. When the console is idle X will not consume much CPU, but it does take up a bunch of memory. I'd vote 3.

And to your reboot problem, you really need to find out where the shutdown hangs...

What messages do you see on the console during those 10 minutes?