Emacs 22, 23 do not always open on Win32

[Theron Stanford]

If I do not set the environment variable HOME, and if I have a file
called .emacs in C:\, neither Emacs 22 nor Emacs 23 will start.
Instead, I get a pop-up dialogue telling me of a "fatal error".

If I rename .emacs to _emacs, then both Emacs 22 and Emacs 23 run, but
neither acknowledges the existence of the file (I can tell because the
customizations are not read in).

If I set HOME to anything, *including* C:\, there is no problem
finding .emacs.

This was not a problem with Emacs 21.3.


In GNU Emacs 22.0.50.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2006-04-22 on
YAMALOK X server distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 5.1.2600
configured using `configure --with-gcc (4.1) --cflags -O2 -march=i686
-mtune=i686 -lm -ffast-math -IC:/gnuwin32/include_emacs
-IC:/gnuwin32/lib -IC:/gnuwin32/src --ldflags -s '

Important settings:
 value of $LC_ALL: nil
 value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
 value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
 value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
 value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
 value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
 value of $LC_TIME: nil
 value of $LANG: C
 locale-coding-system: cp1252
 default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Major mode: Lisp Interaction

Minor modes in effect:
 encoded-kbd-mode: t
 tooltip-mode: t
 auto-compression-mode: t
 tool-bar-mode: t
 mouse-wheel-mode: t
 menu-bar-mode: t
 file-name-shadow-mode: t
 global-font-lock-mode: t
 font-lock-mode: t
 blink-cursor-mode: t
 unify-8859-on-encoding-mode: t
 utf-translate-cjk-mode: t
 line-number-mode: t

Recent input:
<help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo>
<help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo> <help-echo>
<help-echo> <help-echo> <menu-bar> <help-menu> <re
port-emacs-bug>

Recent messages:
(C:\emacs-22\emacs\bin\emacs.exe)
Loading encoded-kb...done
For information about the GNU Project and its goals, type C-h C-p.
Loading emacsbug...
Loading regexp-opt...done
Loading emacsbug...done