"T. V. Raman" <ramantv(a)earthlink.net&gt; writes: That is evil (no quotes I'm afraid) because it overrides the user's settings. If I knew what exactly the problem was, I might be able to help you. This way I can just guess. Let's recapitulate: * In XEmacs, the term "active region" pertains to zmacs regions. They are on by default. If you set zmacs-regions to nil, you kill all zmacs region behaviour -- (mark) always returns the last location of mark, etc. * The functions (point) and (mark) return the endpoints of a zmacs region. If the region is currently not active, (mark) returns nil. If you really really want to know where the mark was last located, use (mark t). * A better (less confusing) interface for using regions are functions `region-active-p', `region-beginning', and `region-end'. * All the commands deactivate the region except for those that explicitly choose not to. This is by design. Not at the end of every emacspeak function, but only at the end of those commands that really need to preserve the region. If every emacspeak function is a movement command then yes, every one of them needs to preserve the region. But somehow I doubt that this is the case. Could you be a bit more specific with the problem description?