sb> Glynn Clements <glynn(a)sensei.co.uk&gt; writes: sb> I'm not sure how well that will work. The Work Of Satan (aka sb> jka-compr.el) takes liberties in the area of redefining sb> low-level load functions. For the user init file, I don't see what to do; I can think of a number of reasons why people might reload their init files, eg, having edited them. Furthermore, who knows if they might `(load "options") or whatever by hand. However, for the automatically generated files, wouldn't the defined interface have them loaded in startup.el, so that they would be loaded in the correct order? Now, startup.el knows what it's loading. Why can't it bind a flag which the custom-set-* functions check to see whether it's the right place or not? Otherwise they would warn the user that the intended effect may not occur due to shadowing by the automatically loaded initialization code. The custom user interface itself would also set the flag. As far as I can see allowing the custom-set-* functions to be used anywhere else potentially loses, justifying a warning. Users with sufficient hubris could even defeat the warning if they wanted to.