So I've been running SLIME at home for many months now--it's a great bit of work: thanks guys! I figured that it's time to start sing CL in the office, maybe port some of my work over from Python. So I downloaded the latest version of SLIME, invoked the appropriate .emacs incantations & then ran M-x slime. It opens *inferior-lisp*, compiles itself, prints ';; Swank started at port: XXX' (where XXX can be whatever), then SBCL prints its '*' prompt and...nothing more. The SLIME REPL never appears.
SBCL is still running; in fact, code typed into the SBCL REPL in *inferior-lisp* runs & prints as usual.
My home machine is running Fedora Core 4, kernel 2.6.16-1.2111_FC4, emacs 21.4-5, SBCL 0.9.14 and an old SLIME from CVS that was current once-upon-a-time.
My work machine is running Fedora Core 5, kernel 2.6.16-1.2107_FC5, emacs 21.4-14, SBCL 0.9.14 (built the same day, by the vendor, as the FC4 SBCL) and I've tried: current CVS SLIME; downloadable packaged SLIME 2.0; the same SLIME as used at home.
I've also created an entirely new user with a clean .emacs and profile, then installed SLIME for him; he had the identical issue.
Anyone have any ideas? I'm afraid that my lisp-foo is pretty weak, so I'm not even certain where to start looking:-(