I have asked the question below at least once before on the list (but
then I mentioned gnuclient):
If Emacs is showing the splash screen and you open a file with
emacsclient then Emacs shows that it is in some kind of recursive edit
mode. The mode line may look like this
--\-- emacsclient.c Top L1 CVS:1.91 [(C/l)] ----------------
Some commands does not work until the splash screens times out. The []
disappears then from the mode line. (You can use M-x top-level to get
out of this state before time out.)
It seems like emacs server should remove the splash screen just as
normal input events does. But how should that be done? The function
showing the splash screen is doing a (sit-for 120).