> Neither of these seems like desirable behaviors.

I tend to agree. But I'm also curious in which circumstance did you
bump into this problem.

I'm finishing up a package to give easy and flexible management of imports
during initialization, and in using the package, I had a function that made some settings
based on a user-specified help character or event. Failures showed up in
the test cases that used more obscure events like M-S-f5,
and the nil eventp caused unexpected behavior. (I've since changed
my approach.)

My own impression is that the patch below would be an improvement, but
I'd rather keep it for after 24.1.

That sounds reasonable to me. It's not a critical issue.

Thanks for your help.

-- Chris