Coddling Emacs

[Laura Creighton]

Emacs <kick> keeps making wretched FILES all over my system.  I know
all about auto-save-default and make-backup-files now and I have made
emacs politely keep its backups out of the current directory
(this is not v6 unix. We don't crash all the time here.  We do,
however, run out of disk space.)  What I can't figure out is how to
make emacs stop making symbolic links  like this:
lrwxrwxrwx    1 lac      lac            44 May 29 08:19 .#CapsBasicWidgets.pyc
 -> lac at ratthing-b246.strakt.com.24677:990877909

every time I modify a file and then go visit a different file without
writing out the changes.  This made my package loader very ill.
Changing my package loader was faster (and easier) than figuring out emacs,
but now I am mortally offended.  Does anybody know what emacs calls these 
things internally so I can find out how to tell emacs to do it someplace else?

Laura