You might have to force the last value of the alist that the map gets flattened into, since otherwise there's no guarantee that it will be read.
You really, really want to be using rnf for this job, instead of turning your brain into a pretzel shape.
*nod* that's my eventual goal but I'd like to make sure I understand what is going on here first and rule out any bugs before I go using some class I'm not that familiar with. I'm starting to wonder if this isn't an issue with Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8.{read,write}File. I am now printing out the data entirely: d <- decode <$> B.readFile stateFile print d and I still get the same error when I go to writeFile later. There should be no data items in any of my structures that the print statement does not force. Tim Newsham http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/