Hello,
I had the same problem. And I solved it when I discovered that there was an
older version of speedbar which came with the NTEmacs 20.6 distribution:
%emacs%\lisp\speedbar.elc
Here is the corresponding excerpt from my .emacs:
(setq load-path (append
'("t:/soft/emacs/site-lisp/semantic-1.1"
"t:/soft/emacs/site-lisp/speedbar-0.11"
"t:/soft/emacs/site-lisp/jde-2.1.8/lisp")
load-path))
;; speedbar.elc is part of emacs. But it is an old version.
;; Thus speedbar-0.11 must be at the top of load-path
(require 'semantic)
(require 'jde)
;; jde itself loads speedbar
hth,
Luc