-- "Golubev I. N." <gin(a)mo.msk.ru&gt; spake thusly: Possibly true, except that I don't have recursive minibuffers enabled, and it was a fairly confusing situation to deal with (which presumably is why recursive minibuffers are disabled by default). The minibuffer was selected in the upper frame and was the only frame showing. I kept getting the 'Cannot switch buffers in minibuffer window' error when trying to switch to another buffer, and ended up having to split the buffers, select the other one (which was now showing a file), and then doing C-X 0 to close the minibuffer 'frame'. If I ever manage to figure out how I did it (your proposed steps won't work, because they'll write-file on whatever buffer is selected, not the minibuffer), I'll post the information.