[comp.emacs.xemacs] Re: M-x shell fails under Windows Vista

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Vin Shelton writes:

 > the "\\e:" looks bogus to me.

I agree it's bogus, but under what conditions does Windows consider
"\e:" a drive letter?  Does Windows say what it's looking for?  (I'm
wondering if all the other backslashes disappear too, as they should
if something is interpreting those as Lisp or C string escapes.)

 > In any case, something in the 21.5 startup code is looking for a
 > file in the "e:" drive, which doesn't exist on Sean's system.

I still think that is a Microsoft bug, not an XEmacs bug (unless
there's a documented way to tell Windows not to prompt for missing
media, which we should use).  It should be possible for a program to
probe for existence, access, etc of data without bothering the user.
Be that as it may, I guess we have to try to reduce the user pain...

Sean, have you tried starting up with -vanilla?  How about with
-no-autoloads and -no-packages?

Do you build the distribution with "--with-prefix=no"?

Since there are no references to "e:" in the output of debug-paths, I
would consider the possibility of something in package auto-autoloads,
as well.  Do you build a package distribution for use with the Windows
installer distribution?