Hi I've recently installed emacs 24.2 on a debian virtual-box After configuring elpa there was errors when running list-packages So I've used toggle-on-error and got the following trace: ------------- Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-function mailcap-parse-mailcaps) mailcap-parse-mailcaps() url-do-setup() url-retrieve-synchronously("http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/archive-contents") package--download-one-archive(("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/") "archive-contents") #[nil "\301\302\"\207" [archive package--download-one-archive "archive-contents"] 3]() package-refresh-contents() list-packages(nil) call-interactively(list-packages t nil) execute-extended-command(nil) call-interactively(execute-extended-command nil nil) --------------- Then I tried to locate mailcap lisp library using M-x locate-library and found two locations: M-x locate-library mailcap - /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/flim/attic/mailcap.el (this one did not contains mailcap-parse-mailcaps) M-x locate-library mailcap.el.gz - /usr/share/emacs/24.2/lisp/gnus/mailcap.el.gz only the second one contains the function required by list-package but the first one is loaded probably because of load-path finally I remove the oldest version of mailcap.el and elpa works fine now. I don't know if the old package comes from an old installation or if mailcap.el is included twice with 2 locations and one has not been updated. Regards frederic