Hi! Attention: Question shows again my complete Emacs ignorance. I've recently begun to use the combination mentioned in the subject. I use a setup as described by Bill Clementson which mainly looks like this: (global-set-key [(f6)] '(lambda () (interactive) (shell-command "c:/PROGRA~1/acl70/alisp.exe +B +cm -L ~/.slime.lisp&") (slime-connect "localhost" 4005))) This works fine most of the time but sometimes fails with Connecting to Swank on port 4005.. open-network-stream: make client process failed: connection refused, :name, SLIME Lisp, :buffer, nil, :host, localhost, :service, 4005 which obviously happens if AllegroCL is not quite ready to accept connections when SLIME tries to connect. I can fix this with adding something like sit-for before the call to slime-connect but either I wait too long which makes the call unnecessary slow or I'm still in a time frame where the error described above can happen. Question: Can I replace the call to sit-for with something that waits until AllegroCL is ready? Or is there a better solution to start AllegroCL from SLIME under Windows? Thanks, Edi.