y-or-n-p sometimes does not display the prompt

[David Kastrup]

Symptoms:

I am afraid, this is not reproducible reliably, but it occurs from
time from time in the CVS Emacs for months now.

Symptom, for example, is when I am in Gnus and posting a composed
article with

C-c C-c

then sometimes Gnu wants to ask me a question like "lines with more
than 80 characters in them.  Sure to continue?" by calling y-or-n-p.
What gets displayed in the status line sometimes however (timing?) is

C-c C-c-

namely Emacs is behaving as though I am still entering a key sequence
missing its last character, and does not display the prompt at all.
When one can guess what has been asked, this is fine, otherwise a
nuisance.  One can often make do with switching to a different window
from the minibuffer and back again.


In GNU Emacs 21.3.50.8 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2002-12-11 on lola.goethe.zz
configured using `configure '--prefix=/usr/local/emacs-21''

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: en_US.iso-8859-1
  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-1
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Recent input:
t m p / e m a c s <return> o <next> C-x 0 <up> <up> 
<up> <up> <up> <up> <escape> <backspace> S <return> 
O <down> <down> <down> <down> <down> <down> <down> 
<down> <down> <down> o <next> <next> <next> <next> 
M-x g n u s <return> p SPC q C-h f y - o r - = <backspace> 
n <tab> <return> q y C-x m <up> <up> <up> C-e C-x k 
<return> M-x p r e v i e w - r e p o <tab> C-a C-k 
r e p o r t - e m a <tab> <return>

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