[ESS] rdired stopped working

[Stephen Eglen]

 > when I do ess-rdired I get: 
 > 
 > Error in parse(file, n, text, prompt) : Parsing error 
umm.  I just tested it (although I wrote it, I don't use it often) and
it seems fine here.

 > until recently rdired worked just fine for me so I am
 > having a very hard time understanding how this could have happened. I
 > havent made any changes recently to my system. I upgraded ESS to
 > 5.2.10 but that did not solve the problem. Also a problem that arose
 > about the same, making me thinking they are related, is that when I do
 > ess-load-file it doesnt load as usually but prints out some seemingly
 > random snippet of the file, e.g. this what it could look like in my
 > R-buffer when I try to load a file with 297 lines:

Ummm; this is really odd.  The only thing I can think of is that in
your email, there were lots of control chars (\200 \230 \231).  Have
you recently changed any language settings?

sorry I can't help more!

stephen