Newbie start-up problem

[Tom Masterson]

Hi everyone,
So, I'm just starting with ESS, trying to get it 
working at home on my Windows 98 box (at work, on my
linux box, it's working fine 8{] ). I have emacs
(20.7)
and ess (5.1.24) both in C:\Program Files\emacs. R is 
in my path and HOME is set to "C:\Program
Files\emacs".
I have added the following lines to my "_emacs" file
in 
HOME:

;; load ess
(load "C:/progra~1/emacs/ess-5.1.24/lisp/ess-site.el")
(setq-default inferior-R-program-name "Rterm.exe")

when I start up emacs, I get the following message:

"Cannot open load file: ess-site"

and, of course, when I open a *.R file, ESS mode does 
not happen. I've tried looking around for an answer to

this (probably foolish) problem, but haven't found
one.
Any clues?
TIA,
tom



=====