Gnu emacs under Windows: .emacs and _emacs and savehist

[Murray Eisenberg]

I've installed a binary version of Gnu Emacs under Windows 
(specifically,t he latest Gnu Emacs + AUCTeX bundle) directly under 
Windows -- NOT under Cygwin -- and inserted the usual code into _emacs 
to activate savehist:

  (require `savehist)
  (setq savehist-file "~/.emacs/history")
  (setq savehist-length 1000)
  (savehist-load)

But I don't seem to see any difference now, either when I exit emacs or 
when I start it again.  In fact, I'm not even certain that emacs is 
processing the _emacs file.

Part of the problem may be the name, _emacs, of the initialization file: 
Originally, the file was named .emacs and placed inside my home 
directory.  But then I realized that savehist wants to save the history 
to a subdirectory .emacs of my home directory, and of course it's 
impossible to have both a directory and another file of the same name in 
the same directory.  Which is why I renamed the file from .emacs to 
_emacs (which I thought was OK).

Before I did that renaming, at least when I tried to quit emacs I saw a 
message that emacs was trying to save the history but could not find 
subdirectory .emacs of my home directory (because, of course, at that 
point, there was none).

So obviously I'm very confused.  Can you help me straighten this out?
--
Murray Eisenberg                     murray@math.umass.edu
Mathematics & Statistics Dept.
Lederle Graduate Research Tower      phone 413 549-1020 (H)
University of Massachusetts                413 545-2859 (W)
710 North Pleasant Street            fax   413 545-1801
Amherst, MA 01003-9305