I have since given another 30 minutes to wrestling with the SLIME install and this time I appear to have won. Here is the trap I finally overcame:
(1) download the 1.2.1 and gave it a try with cygwin clisp 2.35. it failed. (2) followed the "get the latest from CVS" advice. That failed. (3) tried "get the FAIRLY-STABLE" tagged version. That failed.
I went back to the CVS HEAD version did one extra step and voila, it worked. Can you guess what that extra step was?
page down for the answer
Apparently you need to delete the "~/.slime/" directory if you change versions of slime.
It would be nice if slime/emacs could notice that I'm getting ALL my slime files (.lisp and .el) from a different directory than last time and either blow away the old .slime/ directory or perhaps ask me if I want to do this.
Alternatively, slime.info, PROBLEMS or README might mention this.
What pushed me to give SLIME a try again was that I had a problem with ILISP and when I went looking for the ILISP community it looked like it has been dead since 2002 or 2003 :^).
Cheers, --jfc