Subject: bug#25038: 25.1; Accent in Windows username prevents Emacs from loading customizations

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2016 18:08:36 +0200

> From: Márton Marczell <[email-masked]>
> Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2016 10:20:55 +0100
> Cc: [email-masked]
> 
> My previous Emacs version was 24.5 I believe.

Hmm... I don't think anything's changed in the related areas since
24.5.

> I realized that Emacs starts up normally exactly when the path to the working directory contains an accented
> letter. For example if I start emacs in the folder "D:\a\" it displays the error, but if I start it in "D:\á\" it works. So
> this was what distinguished those files from each other.

Thanks, this is beginning to make sense, although I still don't know
what could be the root cause.

If possible, I'd like to eliminate yet another factor: the fact that
the problem happens when you click on a file name in Explorer, but not
when you invoke Emacs from the cmd prompt.  Specifically, if you
invoke Emacs from the cmd prompt in the directory without accent and a
single file command-line argument, does it fail as when you click in
Explorer?  And does it also succeed if the directory from which you
invoke Emacs does have an accented letter?

Another thing to try is to set HOME in the environment to point to a
directory whose name includes accents -- does that fail in the same
way as with your default setup?  I expect it to fail in the same way.

If these two changes in the recipe still succeed in reproducing the
problem, it will be easier for me to try to reproduce it on my system,
and debug it here.

Thanks.

Btw, do you have any software installed, like a non-standard shell or
some other add-on, which could cause PWD to be set in the environment?
If so, what is the value of that variable?