I'm not sure if this is a known solution to this problem; even so it might help someone else with this.
I was getting this error message from every action sent from jdb: Error in process filter: (args-out-of-range 0 0). After a bit of digging around in the dumped code for XEmacs I uncovered the culprit: split-string (amazing just like the the backtraces said). Instead of hacking the hell out of the code I checked the beta mailing list for XEmacs and found a working patch. http://list-archive.xemacs.org/xemacs-patches/200406/msg00014.html Put it in your startup files somewhere and debug until you turn blue in the face; or until 21.4.16 comes out. -bryan