I would side with answers that point to macro comments as the likely issue. I had a  [ %macro comment; ] statement followed by some unused code, having read here (http://www.sys-seminar.com/EE/Files/staceyphillips.pdf) that creating %macro comment and not calling the macro is a good way to comment out sections of code. I used that approach, with a macro comment statement followed by some optional SAS code I did not intend to execute (that section included some regular commented out text, using * ... ; and /* ... */ methods). The "NOTE 49-169" problem began immediately after running this macro-commented-out section. The only solution seemed to be restarting EG. So, if you have any macro comment sections, or macros with comments in them, I suggest removing the macro comment and using some other method for commenting out that section of code, and/or experimenting with different types of comments within that macro to maybe pinpoint the problematic syntax. p.s. A potentially better approach to using a macro for commenting out sections of SAS code is mentioned in this post, although I have not tested it (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12011887/commenting-out-sections-of-code-for-testing). ... View more