Jeff Kell and Patrick Santucci both provided useful
further information about the whens and hows a DDS-1
drive might disable compression, and the use of
DEVCTRL to re-enable it.

But my original question remains--why does this happen
when there has been fairly frequent use in compress mode
over several days (weeks), no human intervention, and
no intervening reboot?

I'm going to experiment with this a bit more and will report
results.  Just as soon as my applications are Y2K compliant
(thank you Cognos, warm hugs and kisses to Adager, kudos
to HP .... big, big thanks to Mercury's brilliant conversion
utility .... we're getting there, with 149 application databases
and roughly 16,000 programs).

Ron Burnett
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