Comment 14 for bug 902043

Hi Karel, this bug was fully reproducible on my Win7 Pro laptop, after a clean install of GNU Emacs 23.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.1.7600) of 2011-03-10 on 3249CTO. I used the defaults on the .exe setup. The resulting installation was nearly unusable -- took about 15 sec to start, and would hang for approx 15 sec every minute or two. Poking around the 'net I found this page, and also a couple of bloggish places which suggested that adding the following to my .emacs might help.

% try to improve slow performance on windows.
(setq w32-get-true-file-attributes nil)

Well... curiously... I couldn't find my .emacs. I did find an .emacs.d/ in an inappropriate place -- my Roaming profile. I couldn't find a HOME var so I put one in a user variable... I wonder, should it be a System var? Anyway I made a user var called HOME, pointed it at LocalLow, and got a usable emacs. One strangeness -- I now have a second .emacs.d/ inside of my .emacs.d/. This new .emacs.d/ eems to be created automagically whenever I launch emacs, so I'm leaving it there for now, but I think there's some residual strangeness either in the codebase or in my setup. The good news is that emacs usually launches within a couple of seconds, except when I'm launching it by double-clicking on my .emacs file -- I encounter the 15-second delay on that. I haven't used emacs heavily yet so don't know if I'll still occasionally get the non-responsive kb bug, but I'm moderately confident that this was caused by an attempt by emacs to create a new file in a roaming profile dir -- this is quite a slow process at best, and didn't even seem to succeed -- I never was able to create a .emacs in my Roaming area.

I have a couple of screenshots which might be helpful (of my homedir and of the HOME var edit miniscreen) but I couldn't figure out how to upload them through the bugzilla interface and have to run now.