Didier Verna <didier(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: This is going to get ugly. XEmacs cannot handle library code playing with timers. Any such code must be wrapped in stop/start_async_timeouts (void) which unfortunately is also only available as part of stop/start_interrupts. A similar problem occurs with modern libesd.so's.. I have a patch for that. However it seems that your socks library calls the fairly innocent getlogin and that uses a timeout in glibc(). Apparently on Linux the timers are fair game for libraries. In addition most of them seem to be using alarm which has much lower resolution than the itimer stuff. We need a better solution for this. Andreas any ideas..? That means that with socks every call to the networking stuff can call alarm(). Some more general solution must be found. Jan P.S. In the mean time play around with your nsswitch.conf to disable to the setting that is triggering the alarm call.