[ESS] XEmacs, ESS on Cygwin and R on Windows XP: inferrior-ess-prompt problem

[Vasiliev, Boris]

Good morning,

I am setting up a Windows XP system with Cygwin, XEmacs, R, and ESS and
I run into a problem - M-x R does not start an R process.  I would
greatly appreciate your help or comments on how to approach the problem.

For R, I have R for Windows, version 2.13.0, with executables in
c:/R/R-2.13.0/bin/i386.

For XEmacs, I use XEmacs 21.4 (Patch 22) that is offered in the latest
release of Cygwin 1.7.9.   XEmacs runs in Windows native GUI mode (not
X11 or console mode)
 
For ESS, I installed ESS 5.13 in the cygwin directory tree at
/usr/local/share/xemacs/site-packages/ess-5.13

The initialization file for XEmacs, ~/.xemacs/init.el, has only few
lines:

;; ?need this definition to get XEmacs to load ESS; otherwise ESS
complains?
(defun w32-short-file-name (x)
"Placeholder for use with XEmacs.  The real function in Emacs returns
8.3 version of full path name of the
Argument.  This placeholder returns its argument only."
x)
(setq inferior-R-program-name /cygdrive/c/R/R-2.13.0/bin/i386/Rterm.exe)
(require 'ess-site)

XEmacs recognizes ESS (there is an *ESS* buffer), but when I use "M-x R"
to start R XEmacs hangs. In the *ESS* buffer there are messages that ESS
is setting up communication with R.  The final line is
"Making Process...Buf *R*, Proc R, Prog
/cygdrive/c/R/R-2.13.0/bin/i386/Rterm.exe Start file=nil, Args=--ess ."
After a while, a message appears in the command buffer: "Timeout waiting
for prompt.  Check inferior-ess-prompt or ess-loop-timeout."
Surprisingly, if an .R file is already open I can start R by pressing
the R button below the menus.

>From looking at the forums, this is a known problem but I could not find
a solution.  Apart from installing XEmacs, ESS, and R in the same
environment, either Windows or Cygwin, is there a simple way to solve
this problem?  (I am hesitant to install R on Cygwin because the R Team
does support the Cygwin port but it supports the Windows version.  I am
hesitant to install XEmacs on Windows because I keep most of my work in
Cygwin directory tree and I am not sure how well XEmacs on Windows will
handle it.)

Regards,
Boris.