Sorry about the premature emission; I didn't realize I'd sent the thing---massive thunderclap followed by complete darkness, it's a miracle of modern technology! And it's all a false alarm, after all (at least for XEmacs itself). ms> Your problem seems to be that you have a configure'd prefix ms> (/usr/local) which, to XEmacs, looks just like an XEmacs ms> hierarchy, ms> (paths-file-readable-directory-p ms> (paths-construct-path (list directory ms> "lib" ms> emacs-program-name))) Is this right? It seems to me that most of the stuff that the binary really needs to worry about lives under $prefix/lib/xemacs-$VERSION; packages might live under $prefix/lib/xemacs/ (which is what is happening in my case, since in-place packages don't work very well). ms> What I'm puzzled by is that you don't get the in-place ms> directory in `emacs-roots'. Could you trace Here's where my ears burn. There's nothing there after all! What happened is that I had xemacs-packages, xemacs-21.1, xemacs-21.2, xemacs-utf, xemacs-yadda-yadda in my Projects/XEmacs directory. So I got tired of collisions in completion and moved ./xemacs-21.x to ./21.x. Although I carefully did ./configure --srcdir again in the build directory, configure left the old symlinks twisting slowly, slowly in the wind.... rm {etc,lib,man,lisp}; ln -s $srcdir/{etc,lib,man,lisp} ./ and everything worked fine. Sorry. Is there a good reason why configure doesn't just do `rm ...; ln -s ... ./'? -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."