strange Emacs 22.1 failure due to utf-8-compose-scripts when --no-window-system used

[Joe Wells]

Dear Emacs gurus

Run the script below to see an interesting failure.  These 3
ingredients are needed:

1. The environment variable LC_CTYPE (or probably LANG or LC_ALL, but
   I haven't checked those variables) must be set (probably to a UTF-8
   locale, but I haven't checked any locales other than "C" (no bug)
   and "en_US.UTF-8" (bug)).
2. The --no-window-system command-line argument must be used.
3. The variable utf-8-compose-scripts must be set.

At this point, various things start failing strangely.  The script
demonstrates one of the failures.

I hope this helps.

Joe

----------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
#
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
emacs --no-window-system --quick --eval '(setq utf-8-compose-scripts t)' --load 
"lao-util"
#
# You will now see an error message like this one (replace XYZZY by
# the appropriate path for your system):
#
# utf-8-post-read-conversion: Recursive load: 
"XYZZY/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/language/lao-util.elc", 
"XYZZY/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/emacs-lisp/regexp-opt.elc", 
"XYZZY/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/language/lao-util.elc", 
"XYZZY/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/language/lao-util.elc", 
"/home/jbw/local2/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/emacs-lisp/regexp-opt.elc", 
"XYZZY/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/language/lao-util.elc", 
"XYZZY/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/language/lao-util.elc"
#
# In fact, lots of things will fail with this error message after this point.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

In GNU Emacs 22.1.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.8.20)
 of 2007-06-27 on artemis
Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.70000000
configured using `configure  '--prefix=/home/jbw/local2' '--enable-debug' 
'--disable-nls' '--with-x-toolkit=gtk' 'CFLAGS=-O0 -g3 -ggdb''

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: en_US.UTF-8
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: jbw
  value of $LANG: nil
  locale-coding-system: utf-8
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t