I have this problem with Emacs 24. If I run VM, along with emacs-w3m as the text/html viewer, then any file I visit from then on seems to get loaded in "literally", i.e., non-ASCII characters appear as octets and DOS line-endings appear as ^M's. The variable `enable-multibyte-characters' is nil in all new buffers.
I am trying to see if anybody else is observing this problem? If so, please let me know if it occurring on Unix systems as well as Windows. Cheers, Uday
