leo> Considering the fact that file-directory-p and file-symlink-p work leo> correctly with remote locations, I'd say that file-regular-p is leo> broken. Further down is what I believe to be another example of it's leo> brokenness ("/vmlinuz" *is* a symlink). I have dug a bit further, and now think that there are two things that are broken. One of them would be the glibc, which accounts for the symlink that is reported as regular file (hence the error on all the emacs flavors). Interestingly enough, ange-ftp (on emacs 19.34) doesn't even need a password to say that "/leo＠localhost:/etc/passwd" is not a regular file, while efs does require one. leo