i only vaguely understand what is going on here. I tried making a buffer-local activate-menubar-hook. here is a test case (defun jdm-junk () (add-submenu nil '("Hi") ) ) (make-local-hook 'activate-menubar-hook) add-hook 'activate-menubar-hook 'jdm-junk nil t) put this in your scratch buffer & eval-buffer. Then click on the menubar. I get the following error: Signaling: (void-function t) t() So basically, things are: (activate-menubar-hook's value is nil) (make-local-hook 'activate-menubar-hook) (activate-menubar-hooks's value is (t)) and this is basically what the make-local-hook docstring says it will do. It also claims it should work. ;-) at the moment, i seem to be too stupid to figure out how to get gdb to break on run-hooks so I can't figure much more out. :-/ jeff