As expected, my extreme frustration with aspell was borne of:
- aspell's draconian error handling and UNIX nature (it was printing errors to stderr--"I couldn't find this file!"--that I couldn't read because it was running in a windowed Windows process, then exit()ing because it considered that a fatal error), and
- my stupidity (I was trying to run my test code with six files from one en_US dictionary and a half-dozen from the "real" en_US dictionary).
That is all.