Fwd: Re: Newbie start-up problem

[Richard M. Heiberger]

Good points.  I agree that upgrading is irrelevant to this issue.
I still recommend upgrading.

I looked again at the detail of the message and I did so in both 21.3 and 20.7.

When I execute the line
(load "C:/progra~1/emacs/ess-5.1.24/lisp/ess-site.el")
The response I get from both versions of emacs is
   Cannot open load file: c:/progra~1/emacs/ess-5.1.24/lisp/ess-site.el

You reported
   Cannot open load file: ess-site

So now the question is what did you actually execute.  Since you are getting
a different message than I see, this suggests that your _emacs is not being
executed and that some other line of code, probably something like
(load-library "ess-site")
or
(require 'ess-site)
is the cause of the message.

Take a look at your c:/progra~1/emacs/emacs-20.7/site-lisp/site-lisp.el
to see if you have such a line.

Take a look at the buffer *Messages* and see if there are any hints there.
This buffer keeps a log of all messages that appear in the message buffer.
In particular, it gives the names of loaded files.

Rich