Ben Wing <ben(a)666.com&gt; writes: I used to have the customize stuff at the end of .emacs and found that this can cause problems: Somewhere above the customize stuff I did read the buffers from the previous XEmacs session using (load "desktop") (desktop-load-default) (desktop-read) when there was a html-file among the files loaded by `desktop-read', I was asked for my e-mail-address and subsequently asked whether I would like to make this permanent. When answering `y', all customizations were overwritten! It looks like the customizations had not yet been loaded (because they followed below in .emacs), therefore customize thought that nothing was customized and created a `custom-set-variables' statement containing only: (custom-set-variables '(user-mail-address &quot;mike.fabian(a)gmx.de&quot; t) '(query-user-mail-address nil)) All other customizations were gone. I was happy to have a backup. After that I moved the customize stuff to the top of my .emacs. This solves the problem. -- Mike Fabian <mike.fabian(a)gmx.de&gt; <mike(a)nozomi.rhein-neckar.de&gt;