Ah, maybe I spoke too soon. Apparently, I need to set swank:*communication-style* to something other than :spawn. Is it known that :spawn doesn't work with sbcl? I somehow thought I'd been using :spawn with sbcl on my other (home) machine, but maybe I was confused.
:spwan should work fine, but you need to build you SBCL with threads enabled -- they are not built by default.
Sorry, I'm confused. Looking at the SBCL build, the only thread relevant feature I found was :sb-thread, which does seem to me enabled by default in the x86 0.9.13 release (it's in *features*). In any case, I built a version from source where I explicitly enabled this feature. I'm not sure how to tell if I did it right, I put a customize-target-features.lisp file in the toplevel sbcl directory, right next to the base-target-features.lisp-expr file, and rebuilt. Using this version did not let SLIME work with :spawn. SLIME seems to start, and then immediately says "Process inferior-lisp hangup," and dies.
rif