In the current head, SBCL 1.0.43.13 fails on swank-loader.lisp, when ASDF is not afailable.
oops, sloppy testing on my part. sorry for that!
since then i've been removed from the committer list, so i can't fix it in the official repo. fwiw, it's fixed in
http://dwim.hu/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=slime;a=summary
happy hacking,