[h-e-w] emacs freezes on a laptop

[Anthony Dardis]

Dear Emacs/Windows list,

I am trying to get emacs to run on an IBM 600X laptop running XP SP2. 
(emacs used to run under '98 on the same machine.)

Here's what happens: I open emacs, I read a file, I start to type, and 
toward the end of the second line (around 130 characters)

        --emacs won't accept any input;
	--the window can be minimized and maximized, but its contents won't be 
redrawn;
        --the window can't be closed;
        --cpu usage goes to 100%
	--the emacs process adds about 300k of memory usage every 5 seconds, and 
doesn't stop doing this.
	--and emacs never comes back. The only way to stop it is by using Windows 
Task Manager.

I suspect this has something to do with the laptop or the laptop/os 
combination, because the very same tarball (a copy of 
emacs-21.3-fullbin-i386.tar.gz from gnu.org) when unpacked and run on a 
different machine does not exhibit these behaviors, it works just fine. 
I've tried different downloads of that file, I've tried an older (21.2) 
tarball, I've tried a different unzip program, the result is very 
consistently the same: right around the 130th or so character, emacs stops 
and won't come back.

Thanks!
Tony Dardis