[h-e-w] extra newline in minibuffer causes grief

[David J. Biesack]

I just got a new Windows XP Pro PC today and installed Emacs 21.1
I had previously been running Emacs 21.1 on NT 4.0 and Windows 2000
(i.e. my .emacs etc)

On this XP machine, I'm noticing strange behavior. Whenever a message
gets echoed to the minibuffer (i.e. (message "test")), the minibuffer
grows by an extra line. i.e. for a one line message, it grows to 2
lines. The *Messages* buffer shows only one line of text. The inibuffer
stays like that until the next keyboard event, then it shrinks back.

It's mostly just annoying, but it is also getting me into trouble
in another case. When I'm running a shell (cygwin bash in this case)
and the input line/cursor is on the last line of the window immediately
above the modeline, then when I enter a cd command and press enter,
I get a message in the minibuffer telling me the new directory
(cd tracking). But my cursor also jumps into the middle of the
buffer because (point) is moved outside the visible region
when the minibuffer grows.

What's the fix?  I tried setting 
  (setq resize-mini-windows nil)
and
  (setq resize-mini-windows t)

but prefer the grow-only (and that's what works on my NT and 2000 boxes)
especially for longer messages or quer/replace with newline characters etc.

-- 
David J. Biesack     SAS Institute Inc.
R&D Java Strategist  SAS Campus Drive Cary, NC 27513
(919) 531-7771       http://www.sas.com