[R-SIG-Mac] help difficulties on

[Ben Bolker]

  Dear R-sig-Mac'ers:

  I'm posting on behalf of a student who is having trouble with
accessing the help files in R.app (I think) on MacOS X.4 (I think
X.4.11?) .  The basic symptom is that in a clean R session she gets
results like this:

> ?plot
Error in file(out, "wt") : cannot open the connection

  This is generic (i.e. happens with any help request).  After a bit
more poking around we triggered

2010-02-09 15:20:21.010 R[16728] *** Exception handlers were not
properly removed. Some code has jumped or returned out of an
NS_DURING...NS_HANDLER region without using the NS_VOIDRETURN or
NS_VALUERETURN macros.
R(16728,0xa000ed88) malloc: *** error for object 0x3b610038:
Non-aligned pointer being freed
R(16728,0xa000ed88) malloc: *** set a breakpoint in szone_error to
debug
R(16728,0xa000ed88) malloc: ***  Deallocation of a pointer not
malloced: 0x41d60; This could be a double free(), or free() called
with the middle of an allocated block; Try setting environment
variable MallocHelp to see tools to help debug

  We have both tried searching/googling for this particular problem,
without success -- found a fair amount about issues with help.start()
when running firewalls, but nothing that seemed to match our situation.

  * Does this ring any bells for anyone? Have we missed something
obvious (I hope)?  What are the next steps in the
diagnostic/troubleshooting pathway?

  * Is there a searchable version of the R-sig-mac archives?
Rsitesearch doesn't seem to offer it, and the R-sig-mac archives seem to
be available only month-by-month (& not searchable), as far as I can tell.

  thanks,
    Ben Bolker

> sessionInfo()
R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)
powerpc-apple-darwin8.11.1

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods
[7] base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_2.10.1

-- 
Ben Bolker
Associate professor, Biology Dep't, Univ. of Florida
bolker at ufl.edu / people.biology.ufl.edu/bolker
GPG key: people.biology.ufl.edu/bolker/benbolker-publickey.asc

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