loess() crashes R on my system

Greetings and happy new year!

I am in the process of converting some of the old S-PLUS scripts from
Visualizing Data (Cleveland, 1993)
into lattice. In fact, I did most of it several years ago, and at the time,
all of the scripts that contained
loess() worked fine. Tonight, I ran most of the scripts again, but every one
that I tried with a
loess() call crashed R. I tried it in two sessions, one with an existing
.Rdata and in another
directory without one. The call below, isolated from its script, is one of
the culprits:

with(ethanol, loess(NOx ~ C * E, span = 1/3, degree = 2,
        parametric = "C", drop.square = "C", family="s"))

In response to the Posting Guide, when I say 'crash' I mean that the system
abnormally terminated
R when this line or any other one that invokes loess() is run. I'm running
the binary version of 2.10.1
on a Dell Studio 15 with Windows 7 Home Premium.

This is the first time I've ever experienced something like this in the
decade that I've used R. What's
more surprising is that it occurred with such a common function. Since I
haven't seen any postings
of this type, it's probably something on my end, but I don't know what.
Since it shut down the
program, I felt compelled to report it.

I am subscribed to r-help but not r-devel, so please cc any response to me.
Thanks in advance for
any assistance.

Dennis Murphy

sessionInfo()

R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

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

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

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