Emacs: (Almost) random crashes about 2-3 times a day on Mac OS X

Question

I have been a happy Emacs user on Mac OS X for almost a year. The problem is that I experienced Emacs almost random crashes several times. My setup:

GNU Emacs 24.0.95.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin, NS apple-appkit-1038.36) [installed as Emacs-pretest-24.0.95-universal-10.6.8 from http://emacsformacosx.com/builds ] on Mac OS X 10.7.3. (The reason Emacs 24 is related to the latest Gnus features.)

The main problem, of course, is that I cannot keep track of the reasons why Emacs crashes. Sometimes it crashes when capturing a new event in org-mode, today it crashed when I added an attachment to an open letter in Gnus for dragging and dropping - both tasks that I often do without problems. The only hint I found is http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-find-the-cause-of-an-Emacs-crash-on-OS-X , it seems that I'm not alone.

Suppose Emacs crashed and I opened it again. If I double-click the file in Finder (to open in Emacs), the file does not open. I rather get a buffer showing a file loaded at some previous point in time. If I double-click the file again in Finder, it will open. I have to do this for every new file that I would like to open. A simple solution is that after a crash, I open Emacs, close it normally, and open it again. Then it works fine - until the next crash :-)

I know this is too vague to be useful to ask (?), But I would like to know if this is a configuration specific issue specific to Mac or Emacs 24. So if someone experiences similar crashes, It would be nice to know. Two guys from Linux told me that they crash about once a month, so I think there is room for improvement :-)

Answer 1

I had the same problem and was able to solve it by deleting all the preference files regarding Emacs.

Answer 2

If it works, the problem is not with your configuration. The problem may be caused by your configuration, but the problem is definitely in Emacs. So please report it with the Mx report-emacs-bug so that we can fix it.