in the interests of full disclosure [ie I now feel bad] - the very last thing I did before writing up my problem was to add the last trailing " 0 " to the shell script shown. and then I ran the program, and did the file listings as shown, and the program was still messing up.
and then last night, the last thing I did was to download, but not unpack or install, the latest version .zip file. and then I start up the old version today, and what do you know? it remembers. and, the shown ERROR message doesn't appear in the current log.
so, crisis averted? I'll watch, we'll see.