Richard Stallman wrote:
>     # is not the problem, at least for vfat and ntfs filesystems. The 
>     problem that was reported was with the *s in #*scratch*#12345xyz#.
>
> I see.  So it is a matter of changing certain chars when they appear
> in buffer names.  That seems harmless; make-auto-save-file-name
> already does some such transformations.  There's no harm adding more.
>   

Here is a patch against EMACS_22_BASE. Chong, Stefan, is it OK to check 
this in now, or do you want to leave the branch until after 22.2 is 
released and only fix it in the trunk now.