nil became bound to (#<save_value ptr=0x085526f0 int=0> 96536 96288)

[Joe Wells]

Somehow in an invocation of Emacs, the symbol nil became bound to a
value that prints as this:

  (#<save_value ptr=0x085526f0 int=0> 96536 96288)

Unsurprisingly, once nil was no longer nil, most things didn't work
anymore and I had difficulty trying to debug it!

I'm not really sure what I was doing that triggered this.  The last
things I remember doing before this happened involved turning off
auto-image-file-mode and maybe also fetching mail with Gnus.

I attempted to fix things enough to be able to shut Emacs down
properly with (setq nil 'nil), but of course this refused to work with
the error (setting-constant nil).

I'm sorry, but I haven't been able to reproduce the bug.

-- 
Joe

P.S.  Version information:

I'm using the Gentoo ebuild app-editors/emacs-22.0.50_pre20050225
which is based on a CVS snapshot from 2005-02-25.

In GNU Emacs 22.0.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.6.8)
 of 2005-08-06 on colinux
Distributor `The Cygwin/X Project', version 11.0.60802000
configured using `configure '--prefix=/usr' '--host=i686-pc-linux-gnu' 
'--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--infodir=/usr/share/info' '--datadir=/usr/share' 
'--sysconfdir=/etc' '--localstatedir=/var/lib' '--build=i686-pc-linux-gnu' 
'--enable-debug' '--program-suffix=.emacs-22.0.50' '--without-carbon' 
'--disable-nls' '--with-x' '--with-xpm' '--with-toolkit-scroll-bars' 
'--with-jpeg' '--with-tiff' '--with-gif' '--with-png' '--with-x-toolkit=gtk' 
'CFLAGS= -march=pentium4 -O2 -pipe' 'build_alias=i686-pc-linux-gnu' 
'host_alias=i686-pc-linux-gnu''

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: nil
  locale-coding-system: nil
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Major mode: Fundamental

Minor modes in effect:
  desktop-save-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  blink-cursor-mode: t
  unify-8859-on-encoding-mode: t
  utf-translate-cjk-mode: t
  temp-buffer-resize-mode: t
  line-number-mode: t
  transient-mark-mode: t