So, as I mentioned in another message, I have the Windows firewall completely turned off. Dorking around with slime.el it seems that the problem is that in slime-start-swank-server the call to
(comint-send-string process (format "(swank:start-server %S :external-format %s)\n" file encoding))
is having no effect. In fact, it doesn't seem to be happening at all. I put something in the elisp that loads slime to trace comint-send-string and I put a call to message right before the call to comint-send-string and I see the message but no sign of any activity from comint-send-string. However if, in the *inferior-lisp* buffer I call swank:start-server with the same arguments as it was supposed to be called with here, a) SLIME then finishes conecting and starts up and b) I see the trace of comint-send-string. So does anyone have any idea why this isn't working? FWIW, I have cygwin installed on this box but I'm not (as far as I know) using it in Lispbox--I have a .bat file that launches Lispbox and I'm using the plain vanilla binary distributions of Emacs and CLISP.
-Peter