Robert P. Goldman said:
>
> As a follow-up to the original question, how does one have a system
> automatically run commands NOT as root when starting up?  Is there some
> way (short of writing C, which I could do), to run commands as a user
> with fewer privileges?

have you tried:
su - <username> -c '<command>'

the 's are necessary if you have command line options

 -munir