[gov1000-list] gam and qqplot functions

Hi everyone, Hope you are all having wonderful holiday breaks. I have a stats question - two actually. I'm having trouble getting the gam function to work (still!)- I get the same error everytime I do it ... that one of my elements has fewer unique covariate combinations than the number of degrees of freedom. I have been using the following code: gam.out<-gam(y~s(x1) +s(x2) +...) I have two dummy variables among my x's - should I take those out? I don't know what else to do.. I've made no progress on this for several days now. Another problem is getting qqplots - Is this the right code ? qq.plot(lm.out, simulate=T) if so, I don't know why it won't plot. Any advice?! Both of these things just shouldn't be that complicated - so I must be missing something obvious, or there must be some glitch with my R that I need to get around. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks! Suzanna