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I'm running emacs 23.2.1 on Cygwin on Windows 7. Yesterday, emacs-X11 was working fine; now it refuses to launch, instead exiting instantly with the error message "Arithmetic error". Running emacs-X11 -Q gives the same error. The exit status according to bash is 255, but it's 65280 (0xff00) according to Process Monitor.

I can run emacs-X11 --version and emacs-X11 --help just fine, but any attempt to open a window fails. I can also run emacs in batch mode (e.g. emacs-X11 -batch -f batch-byte-compile *.el).

Running the non-X11 version of emacs (emacs-nox, or equivalently DISPLAY= emacs; with DISPLAY set :0.0 as I have by default, emacs is equivalent to emacs-X11) also runs fine.

I can also run other X11 programs (e.g. xlogo) just fine.

Does anyone have any idea what might cause this or how I can fix it?

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I've had this problem intermittently as well on my work machine. Rebooting usually resolved it temporarily. – JohnMcG Oct 21 '10 at 16:51
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[I'd comment, but I don't have the reputation. :-( ]

I too have seen this problem running cygwin with emacs32 under X. When I start getting this, other GTK based programs running Cygwin-X also stop working (e.g. navit using gtk). The quick way I have found to resolve it is to restart the X server. [Rebooting is not needed.]

-John

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Hmm well I eventually had to reboot for an unrelated reason, and that seemed to fix the problem; I forgot to try just restarting X11 before rebooting. – Adam Rosenfield Oct 21 '10 at 21:36
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