[newbie] I screwed something up - ~/.bash_profile is never read

[serafim]

I seem to have screwed something up when installing LM8.0
I have a large amount of initializations and definitions
in my .bash_profile but that file is never executed
unless I explicitly enter

source .bash_profile

or 

. ~/.bash_profile

at the command prompt in my terminal windows.

I just don't understand what I did wrong. 
If I start a new shell I must do it by
the command 'bash --login' to have the
intializations.

Kind of embarrasing as I'm far from new on
Linux.

/Serafim