Problem reading in external data and assigning data.frames within R

  Hey there,

    I apologize if this is an irritatingly simple question ... I'm a
new user.  I can't understand why R flips the sign of all data values
when reading in external text files (tab delimited or csv) with the
read.delim or read.csv functions.  The signs of data values also seem
to be flipped after assigning a new data.frame from within R (xnew <--

edit(data.frame()).  What am I doing wrong?

   Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

             -- Nate