problem with new MikTex and new emacs installations

[Peter Flynn]

On 01/04/2019 22:07, Christopher W. Ryan wrote:
> At any rate, using the -Q switch to start plain vanilla emacs 26.1,
> 64-bit, and compiling the my MWE with C-c C-c ENTER (which defaults to
> pdflatex), things seem to go OK.

OK, so there is no problem with TeX itself.
It's either an Emacs package clash, or the AUCTeX packages for Emacs.

> It creates foo.pdf, foo.aux, and foo.log.  Here is contents of foo.log:

That looks fine.

> FWIW, I've also discovered that a tex -> dvi -> ps -> pdf workflow in my
> new emacs installation works fine; it's the tex -> pdf workflow that
> seems to have the trouble. 

But the tex -> pdf above worked fine. Or do you mean the workflow 
imposed by AUCTeX? That seems to be where it tries to detect success.

Does AUCTeX use latexmk to compile with?

> Also, compiling a simple org-mode file
> directly from emacs to pdf works without error.
> 
> I will have to scour my .emacs file closely.

I still haven't fully resolved my issues, and it took a friend who is a 
serious elisp guru to do enough to get me started. It might not be your 
.emacs at all — in my case it was a conflict between one of Emacs' 
standard load files and one of the more recent defaults for nxml.

Peter