Hello, I have made a little more investigation, trying to boil down the dozen of lines in my init file to what ultimately causes the crash. It occurs that this is caused by a tiny missing slash in some info path. I made an MSDos batch file that start emacs with -Q and a few other command line arguments ( --eval and -f ) to do the minial inits and actions to cause the crash. So on my machine when I open a DOS console, and I type call bug18516_1.bat The it lauchnes and immediately after crashes. Hopefully that additional investigation can help you locate what is happening. Please make me know if you have any instruction how to get gdb working, FYI I have this one on my machine: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- GNU gdb (GDB) 7.4 Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Type "show copying" and "show warranty" for details. This GDB was configured as "i686-pc-mingw32". For bug reporting instructions, please see: . ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Please believe that I remain at your disposal if you need me to do any kind of experiments that could help investigating the problem. VBR, Vincent.