Comment 7 for bug 1349087

OK, I think I may understand why this happens. When a new user is created, the first time emacs is run it creates .emacs.d in the user's home directory. But, if the first time the user runs emacs is via sudo, which is more than likely if he is configuring a system, then the ownership on .emacs.d ends up ans root, root. Then when he tries to run it without sudo, the initialisation fails very early on unable to read .emacs.d, his .emacs isn't read, and apparently various search paths aren't set up. So, work around is for the user to reset the ownership and group to himself, which presumably he can do since he ran sudo in the first place. The clairvoyant user will of course run emacs without sudo first time. I clearly wasn't clairvoyant enough.