Slivers in thinned spatial polygon

Dear list,

while trying to simplify a SpatialPolygons object by means of the
thinnedSpatialPoly function of the maptools package, I've encountered
the following problem.

As far as I understand things, setting the topologyPreserve option to
TRUE should allow one to avoid slivers. However, when I use the
function in this way, this does not seem to happen: see for instance
the graph produced by the following example session.

require(maptools)

Loading required package: maptools
Loading required package: foreign
Loading required package: sp
Loading required package: grid
Loading required package: lattice
Checking rgeos availability: TRUE

require(maps)

Loading required package: maps

map <- map("italy", plot = FALSE)
sp <- map2SpatialPolygons(map, IDs = map$names)

t <- sp at polygons[[114]]
a <- sp at polygons[[16]]

ta <- SpatialPolygons(list(t, a))

ta.thin <- thinnedSpatialPoly(ta, tolerance = 0.02,

+                               topologyPreserve = TRUE)
Loading required package: rgeos
rgeos: (SVN revision 360)
 GEOS runtime version: 3.3.5-CAPI-1.7.5
 Polygon checking: TRUE

plot(ta, border = "grey")
plot(ta.thin, add = TRUE)

I'm not sure whether I'm just missing something obvious. Any help
would be much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Kurt