[ESS] Problem running R in emacs using ess-12.09-1

[Chris Francis]

Hi,

I've just installed ess-12.9-1 on my laptop (which uses Microsft Windows 
XP) but find that it won't run R properly.

I have GNU Emacs 22.3.1 and R version 2.15.2.

I thought that I had installed ess-12.9-1 correctly using the "_GNU 
Emacs Simple Instructions:_" in the ess-12.9-1 README file
(I extracted ess-12.9-1 into C:\Program Files\emacs-22.3\site-lisp, 
added the line
           (require 'ess-site)
to `~/.emacs' and restarted Emacs, and saw a buffer named `*ESS*', which 
the README file says means that the installation was most likely 
successful).

When I typed 'M-x R' to run R this seemed to work.  It opened an *R* 
buffer which contained the following text

--------------  start of text in *R* buffer ---------------------

R version 2.15.2 (2012-10-26) -- "Trick or Treat"
Copyright (C) 2012 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
ISBN 3-900051-07-0
Platform: i386-w64-mingw32/i386 (32-bit)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.

R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.

Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.

[Previously saved workspace restored]

 > > options(chmhelp=FALSE, help_type="text")
 > options(STERM='iESS', str.dendrogram.last="'", 
editor='emacsclient.exe', show.error.locations=TRUE)
 >
--------------  end of text in *R* buffer ---------------------

However, when I tried to type the R command ls() at the '>' prompt I got

Invalid regexp: "Invalid regular expression"

in the minibuffer and the R process hung up (I had to use Task Manager 
to end it).

Any suggestions as to how to get R to work in Emacs?

Until today I was successfully running an earlier version of R (R-2.8.0) 
with Emacs using ess-5.3.8.  I updated to R-2.15.2 and ess-12.9-1 today 
because I'd downloaded a recent R package (rB

R-2.15.2 seems to be correctly installed (because I can run it from 
outside Emacs).

Any helpful suggestions gratefully received,

Chris Francis