>  Probably you're doing nothing wrong. When "require" returns false it
>  doesn't mean it failed, it only means that whatever you're requiring is
>  already loaded. When require fails it raises an exception:
> 
>  ruby$ irb
>  irb(main):001:0> require 'notthere'
>  LoadError: no such file to load -- notthere
>          from (irb):1:in `require'
>          from (irb):1
>  irb(main):002:0>
> 
>  What this means is that you've already got "rubygems" loaded. At a guess
>  I'd say that you have a RUBYOPT environment variable with the value
>  "rrubygems" or something similar.

thank you very much.  that result is not intuitive (especially since
the tutorial for fxruby displayed 'true' when doing this), but now that
you explained how it works, i can move on and start learning some
fxruby.

thanks again.