Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com> writes:

Hi Jim,

> (Hopefully I don't need to do anything special to comment on a closed bug...)

No problem,

> Maybe it would be best to revert the Tramp part of this patch and do
> something similar to the patch in my original message. That would
> ensure that nothing unexpected happens as a result of
> `default-directory' being relative to the current drive. If that makes
> sense, I can put together a proper patch for the `M-x shell' part.

As I've said in my reply, I believe the problem is more general, and not
restricted to just the `shell' function.

So I have pushed a patch to master, which reverts my Tramp change, and
which adds the following change to `read-file-name-default' of minibuffer.el: