ssh-agent not the mother of all my processes?

[Neo <netman1@home.nl>]

Hi all,

	using debian woody close to a year, still learning every
day, and running more and more in more difficult to answer 
questions. Here are a few:

	To propagate the ssh-agent values to all your processes
it is started as one of your first processes and all your other
processes are suposed to be started as a child of it. Yet when I
start a gnome-terminal and track its ancestry through 'ps -ef' I end
up with process 1 (easier to do with gps, though, but same result)
without encountering on the way my ssh-agent. Still the environment
has the ssh environment variables (SSH_AGENT_PID etc.) which work
perfectly. How does this happen? Can't I trust ps or what? Checking
with other *nix's (hpux and sunos) I get similar results. Trying to
figure this out, I couldn't find an obvious way to 'debug' my login
process. Is there any way to do a 'sh -x' on it?

Sincerely,

Jan.