Really appreciated the suggestion on SUB-TOP-BANNER. Paul, I went back and
read the postings around it, and I noticed you were trying to do under
1.8d. That was interesting because if it worked, it would allow avoiding
the extra space of the SUB_TOP_BANNER. The problem seems to be the same in
1.8d and 14.4: COOKIE_LOGIN doesn't exist in the static page context (I
think I'm describing this right :-).
Did you ever get it to work? For eveyone's benefit, here's Paul's post:

--------------- Paul Russel writes---------
As I reported previously, I modified the SUB-TOP-BANNER template on a 1.8e
test system to display the login-user-name at the top of each page in the
LISTSERV web interface. If the user has not authenticated, the message
'You are not logged in' is displayed. See <http://sunbear.cc.nd.edu.>.

I would now like to add the same feature to our 1.8d production system,
however, I have encountered some obstacles.

1. The SUB-TOP-BANNER template does not exist in 1.8d. I circumvented this
    problem by using the $WWW_ARCHIVE_HEADER template.

2. The syntax of the .bb statement used to test for a non-null value is
    slightly different. Part of the difference is due to the fact that the
    $WWW_ARCHIVE_TEMPLATE is a static template, while the SUB_TOP_BANNER
    template is a dynamic template.

        1.8d: .bb &COOKIE_LOGIN ^= ''
        1.8e: +bb &+COOKIE_LOGIN

3. This test is succeeding, i.e., &COOKIE_LOGIN is not null, however, it
    appears to contain its own name, rather than the login-user-name.
    Is there a variable which (a) contains the login-user-name and (b) is