I wrote earlier that package update was not working for me with the recently available Carbonized version of XEmacs 21.5.b9 for Mac OS X. I finally decided to try to update the packages with a defcustom defining the remote site and the local directory (defcustom [...] '(package-get-remote (list (quote ("xemacs.org" "pub/xemacs/packages")) (quote (nil "~/Desktop/stuff/xemacs/xemacs-packages/lisp")))) ) added to the ~/.xemacs/init.el startup file. With this in place, I could update packages. For some reason, going through the `M-x customize-variable RET package-get-remote RET' procedure always hung up on the first package. I still got a number of errors and had to restart the update after the first attempt failed with an ftp error (SET IDLE not recognized), but after telling XEmacs to update a second time, the dozen old packages were updated. r. royar