Timeout waiting for prompt. Check inferior-ess-prompt or ess-loop-timeout.

[Jonathan Baron]

I get exactly the following behavior, from a message from the
ess-help archives, July 30, 2001:

  When I do M-x R it hangs for a bit. At this point, nothing has
  any effect except Ctrl G, the menus don't respond etc. After a
  couple of minutes R does start up in a second buffer, and the
  minibuffer says
  Timeout waiting for prompt. Check inferior-ess-prompt or
  ess-loop-timeout.

I'm using Xemacs 21.4 (patch 12) for Linux, and ESS 5.1.21. The
problem started when I started using ESS as an Xemacs package
(and, simultaneously, upgraded all my other Xemacs packages).

I am having a very hard time debugging it, because - and here is
the really puzzling thing - it happens only the first time I try
it each day (after shutting down my computer for the night).
(For several days, I would get the error, change something, then
try again and not get it, and think I had fixed it!)

After the first time, it still takes quite a while to start the
prompt, but I don't get the error.

Any ideas?
-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page:            http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
R page:               http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/