Please don't drop the mailing list. Somebody else may have more of a clue than I do, and you are hiding information from them by taking the thread to private email. In general, all traffic about a project should be on that project's mailing list, unless you are explicitly asked by a developer to go to private email. Jason Yang <Jason.Yang(a)harmonicinc.com&gt; wrote [regarding directory-abbrev-alist]: I found where this is set. In lisp/paths.el, almost the very end of the file, there are a bunch of translations for known automounter temporary mount points. You have fallen victim to the FreeBSD 2.2 automounter rule. To fix this, you will need to (setq directory-abbrev-alist nil) somewhere. It will work for you personally to put this into your startup file (~/.emacs or ~/.xemacs/init.el, as the case may be). However, if other people are using the same machine, then that ought to go into the site initialization file. Better yet, pick some name other than /a for that mount point. :-) Jason Yang <Jason.Yang(a)harmonicinc.com&gt; also wrote: That seems to be new with gcc 3.3. It shouldn't have anything to do with your problem, though. (In fact, it shouldn't hurt anything. It just means that we're being less efficient with some code than would otherwise be the case.) -- Jerry James http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~james/