Hi,
I've had problems starting lisps (lw, sbcl) with emacs v21. Apparently, emacs versions before v22 do not define run-mode-hooks.
But slime.el (CVS head) contains:
(run-mode-hooks 'slime-repl-mode-hook)
This would be better as:
(if (fboundp 'run-mode-hooks) (run-mode-hooks 'slime-repl-mode-hook) (run-hooks 'slime-repl-mode-hook)))