read.table with special chars

Thanks Jim,
I've tried that but still no luck. Some other suggestions?

The comment.char change should have worked, as others have reported that 
it did. The single quote problem came up a few weeks ago and the answer 
then was to remove the single quotes. Perhaps these are more difficult 
to ignore than comment characters. It is probably a good idea to try 
globally removing or substituting these, as they will probably cause 
trouble later even if they can be read in.

Jim