[R] Could "incomplete final line found" be more serious than a warning?

[Michael Bärtl]

Dear all,

I've been successfully reading Web of Science-data from tab-delimited 
text files into a data.frame using an R-script based on readLines().
With new data I just downloaded I suddenly get this warning:

   incomplete final line found

I know this warning has already been discussed numerous times but none 
of the previously suggested solutions worked for me, unfortunately; so 
please bear with me:

I shut the warning down using "warn = FALSE", but the data still won't 
get read so this seems to be more serious than a warning.

Adding a blank line or two at the end of the file did NOT help, i.e. R 
still does not read the file.

But my old files still work properly, though.
So I opened the text files using Notepad++ and saw that the last lines 
of both old text files (i.e. working) as well as new text files (i.e. 
the ones that don't work for some reason) always end with a tab stop 
followed by a line break. Personally I couldn't tell any difference 
between the ways these files ended. Their endings looked identical to me.

I was using R 2.14.0 (64 bit) on Windows when I dioscovered the problem. 
So I upgraded to 2.15.0 (64-bit) but the problem persists.

You can see small examples of an old and new file at 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2joadjo9ce86rij/WoS-old.txt and 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lp9l1exx4mfws1s/WoS-new.txt, respectively.

Does anybody happen to have an idea of what could cause these problems 
for me?

Thank you very much for your consideration!