starting inferior Splus process iESS[S]

[Rich Heiberger]

I can answer some of your questions.

With W95 (and maybe W98 and some others), if you start an msdos session
inside an emacs buffer using the M-x shell command, then quit emacs before
closing the msdos instance, it was impossible to do a shutdown.
..There was a fix posted by Francis J Wright,
    msdos-shell-fix.el --- MS-DOS shell support.
This is not an issue with W2000 or XP, and it may already be incorporated
into more recent emacs.  The fix was posted in October 1998 for NTemacs 20.3

M-x S+6-msdos starts an msdos shell and then starts S-Plus, hence I placed
that warning message in the startup message.

On fontification of dired, try adding this line to your .emacs
  (global-font-lock-mode 1)



The line
c:/programfiles/insightful/splus61/cmd/splus.exe /MULTIPLEINSTANCES S_PRINT_COMMAND=gnuclientw.exe S_PROJ=e:/foo

suggests that you have an invalid address in your .emacs or ess-site.el
file
"c:/programfiles/" is not right.  Replace it with
"c:/progra~1/"

..The 30 second delay is builtin to ESS.  It is necessary on 300MHz machines
to allow the independent S-Plus process to initialize itself before ESS starts
sending it commands.  In principle ESS should be sensitive to the speed of the
processor and adjust the delay time.  My personal preference is for S-Plus
to work off a pipe.  On Windows, Sqpe works off the pipe and doesn't have
interactive graphics with wingraph and doesn't have the GUI.

The non-functioning S-Plus that you see looks like what you might get
if the final "&" in a unix invocation were not there.  Why you get it with
msdos I don't know.  My recommendation is to fix the path and use the cygwin
shell invocation of S, that is the M-x S+6 and not bother with the
M-x S+6-msdos.

Your startup line includes the argument
    S_PRINT_COMMAND=gnuclientw.exe 
.because we make the default assumption that you have gnuserv running.
If you don't I recommend you get it.

Rich