Since migrating from emacs20 to emacs21 (FSF emacs) as part of the potato-->woody upgrade, I have seen the following problem regularly but unpredictably:
Running emacs under X, random simple key-strokes (Backspace, M-q, Ctl-h) will cause emacs to quit without warning or error-message (the window simply vanishes). Unfortunately I have not managed (despite trying) to trigger one of these events inside gdb, so I cannot give more detailed information. But the behaviour has been reported for 3 different machines at this site since the upgrade. The crashes always happen at the beginning of a session (within a minute or two of opening the first emacs window). If you can get past the first 3 to 4 minutes without incident, you're safe for hours to come. But the crashes happen with disconcerting frequency in that initial window of time. Has this problem been experienced by anyone else? Does anyone know what might lie behind it? This level of fragility is very, very unfamiliar to me in emacs. Some users are agitating for an `upgrade' to emacs20. Thanks, Jim
