It turned out, my alias for term was causing the problem for trsh.  I
tried to disable talk requests while using term and enable it back
when done by...

term() { mesg n; \term $*; mesg y }

Removing this line made trsh to work properly.  Oh well, I did figure
out how to recompile my Linux kernel, but it was only when I removed
that term() when everything worked again.  Thanks for your patience.

Hyunsuk Seung
hseung@anat3d1.anatomy.upenn.edu