Ralph, I've made no progress. X log halts with defintion of compose
key and then nothing. I eliminated the command to define the compose
key, but that didn't help.

When you suggeted I put the pgrep lines in ~/.initrc it made good
sense but the terminal from which I ran startx did not disply the
test lines the resulting linex. My ~/.initrc looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
#
# ~/.xinitrc
#
# Executed by startx (run your window manager from here)

# line for test only
pgrep -a Xorg >&2

  if [ -d /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d ]; then
    for f in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/*; do
      [ -x "$f" ] && . "$f"
    done
    unset f
  fi

# two lines for test only
sleep 2
pgrep -a Xorg >&2

exec startfluxbox

The pgrep line run in a terminal works as expcted.

    $ pgrep -a Xorg >&2
    7871 /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg -nolisten tcp :0 vt1 -keeptty -auth 
        /tmp/serverauth.8EwqRRpvho

In order to see what the terminal reports when I startx, I log 
in. At the $ prompt enter startx. When default window manager comes 
up. I kill X to see what the terminal reported.      

When you provided option (a) (nothing returned), I presume the normal
lines resulting from startx are shown, but no additional lines due
to pgrep.