emacs related problems

[billy.chow@eng.ox.ac.uk (Billy Chow)]

Dear all,

There are a couple of emacs related problems that irritates me alot.
I hope that some of you may have come across these before and have
some solutions to offer.

My system:

Debian 0.93R6
emacs-19.29-4.deb
kernel 1.2.13
ispell-3.1.18-2.deb

1.  Emacs doesn't seem to load the site-start.el from the
/usr/lib/emacs/site-lisp.  when I put the site-start.el file as .emacs
in my home directory, it works.  It used to work with my Slackware 2.3
system with emacs 19.28.  I browse through the info files for emacs
(not very thoroughly I must admit) and could not find anything.

2.  Ispell _within_ emacs doesn't seem to work.  Always complaint at
the first unrecognised word with `ispell misalignment at <unrecognised
word>: please retry' or something similar.  Ispell started from a
shell works fine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Billy