After reading some of the more recent posts on my little problem, I thought
I should tell you all how it came to pass that FALSE was TRUE.

It certainly was insidious, but not mischief: a slip of the finger did the
trick.

setvar  save_HPcmdtrace,!HPcmdtrace
....
setvar  !HPcmdtrace,save_HPcmdtrace

Naturally, I did not ever intend to do this; I code this sort of
save/restore all the time. But just inadvertantly placing that little
exclamation point where it should not have been did me in.

And the state of HPcmdtrace was not always FALSE; sometimes it was TRUE -
so I could wind up with TRUE=FALSE and FALSE=TRUE. And, since I run many
command files with many boolean variables in them; I was seeing some truely
bizarre and erratic behaviour.

I would definitely sign a petition to have HP prevent this from happening
in the future.