Thanks for working on this. To me it seems the real issue to attack are the evil autoloads. Idea: the package build/installation process could concatenate all the autoload files into one big auto-autoload for all the packages. Startup routines would load that file, followed by the user's packages in ~/.xemacs/ (there is usually a limited number of these.) Installing a new package would simply rebuild the master autoload file. If the master autoload file is missing, we'd simply fall back to the current scheme of looking for autoloads everywhere.