I have no problem with your test file. Maybe your babel.sty or other pieces of your tetex installation are old?
Here is the result of my run, with a very nice opening report. [kayvan@satyr ~]$ latex test This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.3.1) (test.tex LaTeX2e <1999/12/01> patch level 1 Babel <v3.6Z> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, i talian, portuges, russian, spanish, nohyphenation, loaded. (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/article.cls Document Class: article 1999/09/10 v1.4a Standard LaTeX document class (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/size10.clo)) (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/psnfss/times.sty) (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/misc/a4wide.sty (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/ntgclass/a4.sty)) (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/chess/chess.sty (/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/babel/english.ldf (/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/babel/babel.def))) (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/fontenc.sty (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/t1enc.def)) No file test.aux. (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/psnfss/t1ptm.fd) [1] [2] (test.aux) ) (\end occurred inside a group at level 1) Output written on test.dvi (2 pages, 7548 bytes). Transcript written on test.log. -- Kayvan A. Sylvan | Proud husband of | Father to my kids: Sylvan Associates, Inc. | Laura Isabella Sylvan | Katherine Yelena (8/8/89) http://sylvan.com/~kayvan | "crown of her husband" | Robin Gregory (2/28/92)