[R] nlme on Windows 2000 (v1.8.1)

[Prof Brian Ripley]

See the rw-FAQ, specifically Q2.19.  It is very likely some piece of
rogue software on your machines.

On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Kent Holsinger wrote:

> I have a problem with nlme on Windows 2000, and I'm having a devil of a 
> time determining whether the problem is with my computer or with 
> something in R. I'm running v1.8.1 on a Dell Pentium III with 512MB of 
> RAM and all of the recommended Windows 2000 updates applied.
> 
> If I use Rterm, I can run analyses with NLME to my heart's content. But 
> when I run Rgui, I encounter a floating point exception. To be concrete if I
> 
>  > library(nlme)
> Loading required package: lattice
>  > data(Rail)
>  > lme(travel ~ 1, data = Rail, random = ~ 1 | Rail)
> 
> (the first example in Pinheiro and Bates), R churns for a while and a 
> window pops up informing me of an application error. Specifically, "The 
> exception Floating-point division by zero. (0xc000008e) occurred in the 
> application at location 0x639b50ff." There error occurs every time. The 
> same analysis runs flawlessly in Rterm.
> 
> To make it even stranger, I get the same error on a Toshiba Pentium 
> laptop (also with 512MB of memory, although I haven't tried the analyses 
> in Rterm on that machine). On that machine, I get a blue screen after 
> acknowledging the error. The laptop is a dual boot on which I run Linux 
> (Fedora Core 1). R works perfectly on it under Linux.
> 
> I've downloaded and re-installed the binaries on both machines several 
> times, so I don't think I have a corrupted download. Any ideas on how to 
> diagnose (and solve) this problem would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Kent
> 
> 

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595