[OS X TeX] BibTeX problems

[Jason Davies]

I spent some hours 'debugging' a bib file to try to use BibTex, saved
and was happy. Today I opened it and got a long list of rather familiar
errors, including 

    Author = {Holowchak, M. A.},
    
    possible runaway string...
    
    (the fact that the error window disappears as soon as I switch to
Mailsmith does not help my reporting here...)

what's going on?:-) especially, how come it happily saved then gave me
all these errors on reopening (yes, it's the same file). 

I can't face all that again unless someone convinces me that BibTex is
doing something I can work with - I'd love to use it, but have found all
kinds of things I can't work out (like accents errors which I cannot
fathom...)

thanks for any wisdom on this...
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