After getting Slime with CMUCL I wanted it to work in XP Professional on my company laptop too. So after fooling around with Cygwin and it’s GNU Emacs and CLISP packages to no avail I switched to the Win-32 binaries of both Emacs and CLISP. I apparently got as far as Peter Seibel – who is, ironically, the author of (the free book) Practical Common Lisp which I’m using for to teach myself this language.
I’m not sure where I read it but someone suggested Lisp in a Box so I decided to give it a try. First time I ran Emacs running “M-x slime” gave me “invalid argument” but this was quickly solved by deleting the old .emacs file that was still hanging around in the C:\ directory. Now slime starts up beautifully: “Take this REPL, brother, and may it serve you well.”