The change to SLIME on 2011-12-24 changed the way that the inferior Lisp image is invoked, breaking [my previous instructions on how to get SLIME working under Cygwin][1].
After a bit of wrangling, I have [posted modified code to get ABCL working under the Cygwin Emacs again, changing the canonical location should further updating be necessary][2].
I decided to implement my changed version as a "code walker" that transforms the s-expr emitted by SLIME-INIT-COMMAND, utilising the ability of SLIME-LISP-IMPLEMENTATIONS to specify an init function. I reasoned that this would be better than an Emacs DEFADVICE as the .emacs initialization can now be reasonably shared between different Lisp implementations. DEFADVICE might have been a bit cleaner, but it would probably break just as easily in the future the next someone changes the way SLIME invokes things. For those suitably inclined, comments on this implementation choice would be welcome, as I am not the most experienced elisp hacker.
Bug reports as to the new procedure are solicited if it fails to work for you.
[1]: http://abcl-dev.blogspot.co.at/2010/05/running-slime-under-cygwin-with-abcl.... [2]: http://slack.net/~evenson/abcl/slime-under-cygwin.html
-- "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before but there is nothing to compare to it now."