still having trouble using gnumeric files

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday mindspring com>]

  here's a little more detail on a problem i posted on recently,
i suspect i've just done something silly and someone can tell me
what that is.

  recently, i upgraded from red hat 7.3 to the "limbo" beta, which
appears to have the same version of gnumeric (1.0.5-3, in red hat
parlance).

  however, whenever i open one of my gnumeric files, what is
displayed is the text that was in each cell before, with a dotted
box character between every single letter.  since the actual
data in the file hasn't changed, i'm assuming it's just some
kind of display option that i've messed up.  this all happened
when i upgraded to the newest gnumeric (1.0.9?), but even
regressing to the older version hasn't fixed the problem.

  in addition, starting gnumeric produces the following python
messages:

Could not find platform independent libraries <prefix>
Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec_prefix>
Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to <prefix>[:<exec_prefix>]
'import exceptions' failed; use -v for traceback
Warning!  Falling back to string-based exceptions
'import site' failed; use -v for traceback
Traceback (innermost last):
  File "/usr/share/gnumeric/1.0.5-bonobo/python/gnumeric_startup.py", line 2, in ?
    import gnumeric_defs
  File "/usr/share/gnumeric/1.0.5-bonobo/python/gnumeric_defs.py", line 3, in ?
    import types
ImportError: No module named types


  and even if i create a new file and start adding text to a cell,
i still get the dotted boxes between every character.

  hints?  and why does running gnumeric create a python traceback?
i just checked the dependencies for gnumeric and it says nothing 
about python.  just a bit confused here.

rday