For the life of me, I can't make it break at the moment.
Hope some of this might help.
Glenn
One thing I forgot to add, I've just been recently removing the secret .slime directory containing the swank fasls whenever I update my slime from CVS, because it's been having loading problems with nregex. That coincides with the time that FFI started working for me. I also download the slime tarball rather than using command-line CVS to access slime. When I do that, I rename the existing slime directory and unzip the tarball and move the slime directory to where it's supposed to live. So I have totally clean, fresh dirs both in slime and .slime.