Hooray, my browser works, my browser works.
Tried to reply to Cynthia earlier and oh, boy, thought I was in serious trouble this time - I was about ready to blame SAS on this one.
OK. Guess it's time to try tech support, although I'm up to date on patches and versions and such.
Difference between OS2Rules (I agree) and my stuff is that I'm writing 12 months, 4 quarters, and YTD each one of which has about 1200 rows and 20 columns. I don't know that that would materially impact things - text is text. The data set is only some 25,000 observations - not what I think of when I think of big.
On the buffers stuff, I was thinking that at one time MS file system was extraordinarily wasteful of space and that there was a time when I would have to set buffer sizes so as to minimize paging in a SAS dataset. I didn't know if something like that was in play here as well.
Thanks to both of you. Onward to Tech Support.