[ruby-talk:14601] bizarre File open, read, close problem on Win98?

The following bit of code is extracted from a larger chunk of code.  It 
basically just opens a file, gets each line and checks to see if a regex 
is satisfied (or a series of regex's in a boolean equation, but in this 
case it's a simple regex).  The problem I find is that if the file that is 
being checked is fairly large (in this case it's about 190K bytes) the 
program eventually just stops under Win98 for no good reason.  I haven't 
yet tried it on any other platforms, I will try it on Win2000 soon.

I'm wondering if anybody else can try it under Win98 and let me know what 
they get.  Of course you'll have to change the file name that's being 
opened and it should be a fairly large file.  In the latest run that I did 
of this, it got to iteration 191 and is just sitting there.  Also, the 
time between the messages being printed seems to be very non-deterministic 
(sometimes up to a minute between reports, other times less than 20 
seconds).  I'm running 1.6.2 in case that matters, and I used the -d flag 
for debug.

Here's the code:
####################################################
i = 0
while true do
   i += 1
   puts i
         rptFile = "CYPsw00695.rpt" #a 190K text file
         srchStr = "/Error/"  
         rpt_h = File.open rptFile
         puts "after File.open #{rptFile}" if $DEBUG
         puts "srchStr is: #{srchStr}" if $DEBUG
         while rpt_h.gets do
           #puts "while: #$_" if $DEBUG
           if eval srchStr
              failed = false
              found  = true
           else
              failed = true
              break
           end  #if eval
         end
         rpt_h.close
end        
###############end###############

Phil