Fair enough, in that sense it is a Slime issue: you're not using multiple threads when you start SBCL from shell, but apparently you're using :spawn for Slime. Try :fd-handler or :sigio instead.
Yeah, I could. I have this all working on another machine, but it's using a different version of sbcl 0.8.17, and it seems that these problems crop up on 0.8.14 and later. I just installed sbcl 0.8.17 from debian unstable, and now SLIME won't even compile --- I get a type error when it tries to compile DEFMETHOD INSPECTED-PARTS.
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