html help - PS

[Rich Heiberger]

my immediate reaction is to ask if you picked up the lines and dropped
.then into M-x :, or did you retype them.  Specifically, the fact that
you needed to manually enter the RET makes me think that the "\n" in the
line
  (setq inferior-ess-help-command   "help(\"%s\", htmlhelp=TRUE)\n")
was not typed.

The ^M is an indicator of windows end-of-line convention.  Why it is showing
up on your linux system puzzles me.  I hope it, and the WARNING are side
effects of missing the \n.  Please pick up the line and drop it into
the M-: minibuffer

Rich