The following message is a courtesy copy of an article that has been posted to comp.emacs.xemacs as well. On Mon, 8 Dec 2003 at 15:10:30 -0800, Itay Furman <itayf(a)fhcrc.org&gt; wrote on comp.emacs.xemacs: This newsgroup is good for getting in touch with people who have already solved a problem you are now facing. For things that need developer attention, mail to xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org is better. I am sending my response to that newsgroup, so followups should go there as well. I'll let you decide if you want to keep the newsgroup in the loop or not. Also, for future reference, M-x report-emacs-bug will present you with a mail buffer containing information about your XEmacs. All you have to do is fill in the details of your problem and send it in. If you look at the ispell.el file (M-x find-library ispell), you'll see that it identifies a few scenarios that can lead to this error message. Right above the line that generates the error, it says: ;; This occurs due to filter pipe problems although what that has to do with "incompatible versions" is a mystery to me. A few lines higher up it says: ;; Alignment cannot be tracked and this error will occur when ;; `query-replace' makes multiple corrections on the starting line. At the very top of the file, under BUGS, it says: ;; Multi-byte characters if not defined by current dictionary may result in the ;; evil "misalignment error" in some versions of MULE emacs. and: ;; Recursive edits (?C-r or ?R) inside a keyboard text replacement check (?r) ;; can cause misalignment errors. The problem isn't that aspell can't process the file. The problem is that aspell's idea of where point is in the file is different from XEmacs' idea of where point is in the file. Why they have different ideas is the question here. This is good! Reproducible test cases are a debugger's dream. I see it, too. When I run with edebug, I see that, on a "good" run, ispell-process-line communicates with the subprocess, after which ispell-filter is nil. On a "bad" run, after ispell-process-line communicates with the subprocess, ispell-filter contains a list of strings *from spellchecking SNP in line1.tex*! That's why it is getting confused. So why is ispell-filter wrong? I instrumented ispell-filter for debugging, and sure enough, it gets the return string for SNP *after* it was requested to check "\label{". Weirdly enough, it then gets the return string for STR! Somehow, communication with the subprocess has gone badly awry. -- Jerry James http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~james/