crash when DVD in laptop

Tony,

    My version of R crashes upon start-up if there is a DVD in my
laptop.  The DVD does not have to be playing.  This problem seems
quite reproducible.

thanks for the report. This was a nasty bug that has been sitting  
there for quite a while and has been fixed in the 1666 build.  
Unfortunately the nightly builds are down right now due to server  
update, but I have put a (Tiger) build at
http://www.urbanek.info/R-app-1666.dmg

The background is that there was a missing nil pointer as the  
termination of an array, so if R was lucky enough to be started in a  
clean "zeroed" memory, it worked. If the memory wasn't zeroed, it  
crashed. This can be affected by many factors and the DVD is just one  
of many random factors.

Cheers,
Simon