Something smelly here. [.emacs-custom file]

[reader]

I've used an external emacs-custom file for years to keep .emacs a
little leaner.  Its proven to be a good choice many times.

Now I've moved to an unfamiliar os (winXP) for certain kinds of video
work.  Dragging along my old and familiar editor .. emacs.

On the win OS some things are a little hinky but this is really a weird
one.  Reminds me of the old joke about getting the Optic nerve tangled
up with the Sphincter muscle and ending up with a ... well `unclean'
view of things.

In this case I've gotten something to do with mail tangled up with
.emacs-custom file.  It keeps trying to write part of a mail message
to the custom file.  Whenever I close gnus or send a news post
something like this gets written to .emacs-custom:
       (custom-set-variables
        ;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom -- don't edit or cut/paste 
it!
        ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
        '(canlock-password "3931d41841769fd6053e719084096803d2381412"))
       (custom-set-faces
        ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom -- don't edit or cut/paste it!
        ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
     )
     From: reader@newsguy.com
     X-Draft-From: ("rec.woodworking" "")

The first part looks sort of normal although I have no idea what a
`canlock-password' is all about, but the partial mail header is just
wrong.

Once this happens and I close emacs.... on next start of emacs, the
init process finds that cruft and errors out.

My init files are setup as  close as I could get them to my old unix
setup.  But I haven't used the customize stuff at all yet.  So
technically it seems nothing should be in  ~/.emacs-custom.