I take it now that this is peculiar to emacs 23.  I apologize for taking up
the time of kind people on the list, and I also wish to thank them for
helping me to figure out what it was.  I still don't know, but I have four
emacs executables (Gentoo GNU/Linux system, AMD64).  Only emacs-23 has this
bug.  I'll send ti to the developers.

Now, for the following I do not get this error:

emacs-22-cvs
emacs-22
emacs-21

Thank you again.

Alan Davis


-- 
Alan Davis, Kagman High School, Saipan  lngndvs@gmail.com

"An inviscid theory of flow renders the screw useless, but the need for one
non-existent."
         ---Lord Raleigh (aka John William Strutt), or else his son,