Emacs places infelicity

I just hit a small speed bump with Fedora Core 3's XEmacs (21.4.15-9). I am doing a bit of system maintenance in a "sudo bash" shell. I fired up XEmacs to edit a few files. When I tried to exit, I got caught in this twistly little maze of passages, all alike (XEmacs's queries on the left margin, my responses indented slightly): Save file /users/james/.emacs-places? (y, n, !, ., q, C-r or C-h) n Save file /users/james/.emacs-places? (y, n, !, ., q, C-r or C-h) n Modified buffers exist; exit anyway? (yes or no) yes A buffer is visiting /users/james/.emacs-places; proceed? (y or n) y File .emacs-places is write-protected; try to save anyway? (yes or no) no Attempt to save to a file which you aren't allowed to write And XEmacs does NOT exit. Asking me whether I knew what I was doing ONCE would have been sufficient. And what's up with XEmacs trying to save to .emacs-places after I explicitly told it NOT to, several times? -- Jerry James http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~james/