Today I wanted to update one of my r-forge packages (optimx) and when I ran the usual R CMD check optimx I got all sorts of odd errors with Latex (and a very slow R CMD check). I thought I had managed to damage the Rd file, which indeed I had changed. Since I recently started using Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) but had kept an alternative boot on a separate disk to 8.04 (Hardy). On reboot, the R CMD check worked fine. I thought that maybe I needed to reinstall pdflatex, which turns out to be part of some of the tetex packages. Since fonts seemed to be at the heart of my problem, I installed tetex-bin, and problems went away. I'm not sure how this sort of glitch should be documented, but thought at least a mention here might help some others. JN