spawn broken on idl 5.3?

[Martin Rother <rother(at)gfz-potsdam.de>]

  hi IDL wizards,

   (first I apologize for my bad english)

   I'm running IDL scripts communicating with fortran-programs
   (f77, i.e. calculation of geomag.field/IGRF) by bidirectional pipes
   created from 'spawn' command (with keyword 'unit')

   this works fine for years. now I found the spawned program
   vanished without any message, more or less immediately -- and
   the next (first) 'readf, unit, buf' fail, of course.

   after downgrading to 'IDL 5.2' all is working fine again.
   I can't belive, that THIS usefull feature (one benefit
   of IDL over 'matlab'?) is broken totally.  kkkkrrrrxxxxxxx....!

   I searched 'dejanews' and found some articles about this (or similar)

   subject, but I found no workaround and remain hopeless.

   have I to stick on version 5.2 forever?

   (my environment: sparc, solaris 2.6 and enough memory...)

   thanks in advance for hints.

        best regards,
        martin rother.

--
Martin Rother (rother@gfz-potsdam.de)   0331/ 288-1272           Division 2.3
                                        GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Germany