[I ditched review from the CC'es] Olivier Galibert <galibert(a)pobox.com&gt; writes: This is weird 1. After scanning the packages the locate-file cache should be filled and scanning the tree should be cheap shouldn't it? 2. If you _have_ site-start.el it should be in ../site-packages/lisp which should be very early in the search sequence. The problem is that XEmacs is still doing the generic loading code at startup this includes such stuff as checking for outdated .elc files etc. IMHO XEmacs should just try to open ../lisp/package-name/auto-autoloads.elc and handle any errors. No stats required. Then one should get rid of the stupid double loading the mule coding does (if you do this at C level the first 3000 byte will typically still be in the stdio stream buffer and no additional I/O is required). Long term I think the format of the .elc files should be rethought. Why is it a lisp file? Jan