Ian, I think the problem might be local to your system. I'm running a pretty virgin system that was recently built from scratch and I can run that command in emacs with no problem.
Was there anything enlightening in the *Messages* buffer? The last 2 lines should just say: Loading shell... Loading shell...done Try: M-x set-variable debug-on-error t M-x shell Anything interesting, like permission problems or a lower level call that you can try manually yo get closer to the problem? Costa
