[h-e-w] Emacsclient ERROR pop-up window and ~/.emacs.d/server/server

[Christian Schlauer]

Hello!

I see this ERROR pop-up window all the time on MS Windows XP (I use
the "official" binary of Emacs 22.1 from ftp.gnu.org) when

(1) there is no Emacs running and

(2) I open files with Emacs from the Windows Explorer via right-click
    on the file -> Send To: Emacsclient, where

(3) Emacsclient is a shortcut with the "command line":

    emacsclientw --no-wait --alternate-editor=runemacs

(An easy-to-follow recipe to reproduce the bug follows below.)

The pop-up window looks like this:

In GNU Emacs 22.1.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600)
 of 2007-06-02 on RELEASE
Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 5.1.2600
configured using `configure --with-gcc (3.4) --cflags -Ic:/gnuwin32/include'

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: DEU
  locale-coding-system: cp1252
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Recipe to reproduce the problem:
--------------------------------

1. Rename your .emacs to something else and create a new .emacs that
   only contains

   (server-start)

2. Open a command prompt

3. For convenience, add the bin-directory of the Emacs distribution
   temporarily to your path (if it isn't already -- adapt the
   following line to your system)

   set path=e:\emacs\bin;%path%

4. emacsclientw --no-wait --alternate-editor=runemacs foo.txt

   This causes the above error message to pop up. After pressing OK,
   Emacs starts and everything is as usual. If you haven't got the
   error message yet, just repeat step 4 once.

5. Now the "workaround" to avoid the error message: Delete the file
   "~/.emacs.d/server/server" and repeat step 4: no error message!

   But if you close Emacs and repeat step 4 *again*, the error message
   shows up *again* as there is a "~/.emacs.d/server/server"
   file *again*.

Regards,

Christian Schlauer