Thank you to everyone who replied to my curious problem, which just got more curious. Today I closed my copy of R, opened up a different copy of .RData (in another directory), one that didn't have the ".print" problem. Worked w/ that for a few minutes. Then closed R again & restarted from the copy of .RData that was giving me the ".print" problem in all my programs (and consistently gave me that problem, even when I reloaded it yesterday). All those problems disappeared, even running exactly the same code I couldn't get to work yesterday. The "."'s disappeared from the code as well. Go figure! I guess I'll always keep a copy of my current .RData file, just in case this happens again. For those who asked, I'm working w/ R 1.7.0 on an OS X 10.2.6 system. Thanks again, Peter