[R] Off topic help-- But interesting behavior on XP Professional

[Michael Grant]

Please excuse the off topic question, but some of you
certainly have very significant computer savvy beyond
R and statistics and I would like to tap that
knowledge. I do not believe this to be an R problem,
but to date I believe that R is the only application
on my machine that has been impacted. That may be
because it is the only application that I use every
day.

In this email I am asking R-Windows-Novell list
readers about any similar experience. I am running R
on several machines at work and at home. Each machine
has a local installation. On one machine--Windows XP
Professional hooked into a Novell network (at
work)--running R 2.0.0, I have an occasional entire R
directory disappear. Actually, if I search the drive
it turns up in another directory. This morning it was
the 'modules' folder. It turned up in a subfolder of a
folder located in the same folder as 'rw2000'. Earlier
last month I found one of my roving directories
elsewhere in a totally 'non-R' region of the C: drive.

My directory structure reflects that I typically
manage transitions between R versions by having a 'R'
super folder containing different versions of R and
multiple project folders. Currently however, the
computer is relatively new and only 2.0.0 is
installed. My R directory structure looks something
like this:

               R
               |
       ------------------------ ...
       |       |         |
       misc  projects  rw2000    ....
              ...        | 
                    --------------- ...
                    ...   |     |
                         bin   modules  ...     .]
                         
After I booted up this morning, I opened R and went to
install a package from CRAN by way of the drop down
mwnu. It bombed and indicated that module/internet.dll
couldn't be found. When I 'searched' the C: drive, the
'modules folder turned up in a subdirectory of the
'projects' folder. Now I do not normally poke around
in rw2000 and had not done so since installation. That
is, I do not believe I moved the folder via a 'drag'. 
 

Until this evening I considered this to only be
nuisance but, comparing directories at home and work,
I now suspect this has been occurring for sometime.
That is, tomorrow morning at work I will be looking
for other folders which also appear to be missing
though they have not been missed by R to date.

If you have had or are aware of similar experience
could you please let me know--privately or on the list
if there are bigger issues. R is 'non-standard'
software at my firm and hence when I approach the MIS
folks I would like to have things in order as much as
possible. Given my paranoid nature I suspect some
nefarious combination of XP and the network.

If you don't have any ideas, que sera, sera. I'll slog
through whatever lies ahead and never, ever, give up
my R. 

Best regards,
Michael Grant