The following expression causes Emacs to crash in Windows 7 (and probably other versions) with Emacs 24.3.1: (with-temp-buffer (start-process "crash-emacs-bug" (current-buffer) nil) (process-send-eof)) The `start-process' call here is creating a pty process (according to the docstring). The exact version string is (official GNU build): GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.1.7601) of 2013-03-17 on MARVIN This issue was originally discovered here: https://github.com/skeeto/skewer-mode/issues/38