paul,
you da man!
thanks... the hash issue appeared to be the problem...
for future reference, should i routinely clean the hash information 'hash -r'? is there some loaction/script that i should place 'hash -r' so i don't run into this again...?
I wouldn't worry about it. This comes up so infrequently (first time for me in at least 10 years) that I had to look up the manpage for "hash" to figure out the right syntax to use.
Paul.