| Actually, you could look for the problem I was curious about by running
| darcs changes -s on the local HEAD repo.  That'll force darcs to open and
| parse every patch, and that's where the error seems to be coming.

I did darcs cha -s > /dev/null, which seemed to complete normally, both on the unpacked tarball, and on the local copy of the HEAD.

Remember the gzopen message seems to be concerned with writing not reading

S