Re: find-file seems to hang

[Richard Stallman]

    That would only fix the one case with imenu, which I stumbled over.  There
    might be other modes which also output something.  If it's not possible to
    display the echo area above the mini-buffer, I think the read-* functions
    should clear the echo area if it's in the way.

The do, I think.  I think what happened here is that the message
came out after the question's prompt.  That is a somewhat harder
case to handle in general, and there are probably fewer places
in the code that could do this.

If you implement a general solution, that would be fine,
but I think that fixing it case by case is ok too.