Segfault in pure R code

[...]

Ouch.  Call the marines...

The error comes from the garbage collector, which means that something
got corrupted in internal data structures some time previously.

The most important thing is to preserve the bug. Rebuild anything and
the symptom disappears, but the bug will still be there. So keep the R
binary, the script, and the .RData file around.

I moved the relevant files to a new, empty directory to keep things
clean, and it resulted in a variation of the error:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

library(xtable)
?xtable)

Error: syntax error in "?xtable)"

?xtable
help.start()

Making links in per-session dir ...
If '/usr/bin/firefox' is already running, it is *not* restarted, and
    you must switch to its window.
Otherwise, be patient ...

library(bemanning)
load("bemanning07-32.rda")
courses("Ingrid")

Error in attributes(.Data) <- c(attributes(.Data), attrib) :
        value of 'SET_ATTRIB' must be a pairlist or NULL, not a 'raw'

gu

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x08148cd0 in Rstrlen (s=0x0, quote=34) at printutils.c:342
342         return Rstrwid(CHAR(s), LENGTH(s), quote);
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

('gu' is a data frame in 'bemanning07-32.rda', used by 'courses')

Does that throw any light on the matters?

Also tried to move things to my job machine, with other versions of R
and bemanning, but no errors there.

G?ran