Thank you Nick for helping me troubleshoot!

Are you using the upstream org-mode or the one that comes with your
> emacs? In particular, what version?[1]

Org-mode version 6.26trans

> And how do you load org-mode from
> your .emacs (including any settings of load-path)?

 ; Orgmode
; http://orgmode.org
; using orgmode-dev requires org-install
(setq load-path (cons "~/system/elisp/org-mode/lisp" load-path))
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/system/elisp/org-mode/contrib/lisp")
(require 'org-install)
(require 'org)

>
>
> Also, can you do C-h f org-export-as-ascii <RET> and include the output
> in your reply?

org-export-as-ascii is an interactive autoloaded Lisp function in
`org-exp.el'.

(org-export-as-ascii arg)

Export the outline as a pretty ASCII file.
If there is an active region, export only the region.
The prefix arg specifies how many levels of the outline should become
underlined headlines.  The default is 3.

>
>
> Thanks,
> Nick
>
> [1] C-u M-x org-version <RET> will insert the version string into the
>    buffer, so you can easily annotate any email you send with the
>    version. It is *always* a good idea to include the org-version with
>    any questions/problems you send to the list, as well as the
>    corresponding emacs version: C-u M-x emacs-version <RET>.
>
GNU Emacs 23.0.91.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.16.0) of 2009-04-05
on crested, modified by Debian

Eraldo