Re: What's the problem?

[Richard Stallman]

     * Make sure the pause is cleanly canceled if you hit ^G (I'm not really
       sure what it does now, but it acts very strangely if you hit ^G)

Coud you debug that case?

     * Only pause to show the error message the first time the autosave for
       a particular file fails; if subsequent autosaves fail, just show the
       error message with no pause (however, if autosave then _succeeds_ at
       some point, it should presumably reset the state so that it pauses
       upon any failure after that)

That sounds like a usable idea.  Would you like to try to implement it?

     * maybe put a big obvious warning in the modeline for buffers where
       autosave failed (text, uppercase, red, blinking... :-)

That would work ok for buffers that are visible, but would fail to do
the job for others.