And after further investigation, the culprit for this woe was having spaces in directories on the computer system, which caused some woe in some shell scripts that contained things like:
set here = $PWD
... and later used the "${here}" quantity/string.
Several/most (maaaaybe all?) scripts have been updated to avoid this behavior, wrapping variables in "quotes". It would still be advisable not to have spaces in filenames (this particular case was caused by an external drive's name, not set by the user).
-pt