[R-SIG-Mac] Corrupt .RData file?

[John Maindonald]

Recently, when I fired up R in one of my directories, the following  
happened.

R : Copyright 2005, The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Version 2.2.0  (2005-10-06 r35749)
ISBN 3-900051-07-0

> R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
> You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
> Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.
>
> R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
> Type 'contributors()' for more information and
> 'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.
>
> Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
> 'help.start()' for a HTML browser interface to help.
> Type 'q()' to quit R.
>
> Error in fun(...) : couldn't find function "assignInNamespace"
> Error: .onLoad failed in 'loadNamespace' for 'Matrix'
> Fatal error: unable to restore saved data in .RData
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

After pondering the matter, I renamed the .RData file to corrupt.RData,
and fired up R.  I then found that

load("corrupt.RData")

worked with no problem at all.

Any ideas on what may be happening here?

I am running 10.4.2

John Maindonald