Late breaking news on the matter: Doing (require 'compile) in xemacs-21.1.10.exe -vanilla causes following error: Signaling: (end-of-file "internal input stream") load-internal("compile" nil t nil binary) load("compile" nil t nil) require(compile) I spent a lot of weekend to debug this. Finally I had the idea to #define ENCAPSULATE_CLOSE in nt\config.h and rebuild XEmacs. Setting a breakpoint in sys_close revealed that /* Close all descriptors in use for Fload_internal. This is used when starting a subprocess. */ void close_load_descs (void) { Lisp_Object tail; LIST_LOOP (tail, Vload_descriptor_list) close (XINT (XCAR (tail))); } called by Fcall_process_internal is closing the fd of compile.el[1], causing the error above. Commenting out the call to close_load_descs() in Fcall_process_internal makes the error going away. I haven't seen any averse effect of leaving these fd's open. The problem is not really fixed in 21.2-b33. It does not show up there because the renamed Fold_call_process_internal is only used under these circumstances: (if (or (noninteractive) (not (eq 'windows-nt system-type))) (apply 'old-call-process-internal program infile buffer display args) What do the Windows process-experts suggest to fix this for 21.1.x? Best regards, Adrian Footnotes: [1] I have moved compile.elc out of the way temporarily. -- Adrian Aichner <adrian(a)xemacs.org&gt;