Beth - as you said, this is simply to stop repeatedly typing in sudo each time I login. I know its not the best, but for the last seven years I've had root access and now having to use sudo is a real pain and I just want to make life as easy as possible!
Why don't you just log in as root, then? Running sudo -s will effectively do that. And if the reason is that your ssh is configured to disallow root logins (and many are for security reasons), is doing it via sudo really a good idea? What makes it better doing it via sudo?
I'd like to hear more on your thoughts about this.