As the subject indicates, I'm trying to configure a completely self-contained clisp/emacs/slime "lisp box" on a USB thumb drive for lunch-time hacking on a Windows workstation with limited privileges. I'm almost there. If I set HOME to the drive letter of the USB stick before launching emacs, the ".emacs.d" and ".slime" directories are created/used on the USB stick instead of the hard drive. I have a batch file located in the root directory of the thumb drive, and it executes "set HOME=%CD%" before luanching emacs. Seems to do the trick for these directories.

However, I've got 2 issues with slime. One is the firewall. When slime starts, I get a Windows Firewall warning that "lisp.exe" is blocked and that only the Administrator can unblock it. However, closing out of the dialog doesn't really have any negative effect that I can tell, and slime seems to be connected to the lisp process and the REPL seems to work as it should. Is there anything I'm missing here?

The other issue with this setup is that slime tries to create a temporary file on the hard drive (possibly something to do with the locking the lisp process PID number?), even though HOME points to the thumb drive. Is slime using some other environment variable besides HOME for the location of creating this file? Slime issues a warning about being unable to lock the file or something (I can't recall the exact warning right now). As I said, these machines have fairly limited privileges, which is why I want everything contained on the USB thumb drive, including all temporary files.

Any pointers on these 2 issues (or anything else I'm overlooking in setting this up) would be appreciated!

Thanks, John