Moving to xemacs-beta from xemacs-patches. vin> Worked for me. I don't know whether or not vin> user-init-directory can be nil. Not unless you're facing an Exceptionally Tricky People. It is initialized to a string in setup-paths.el, and all of the initialization code that touches it (in startup.el, anyway) sets it to strings. It could theoretically be zero-length, though. This should not be a problem. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.