When I start emacs and then edit an org file, ascii export fails (M-x org-export [return key] a).  No export file is created and I see the following message:

    Autoloading failed to define function org-export-as-ascii

But if I type:

    M-x org-customize

then export works.  The other way I can get this to work is to manually load org-ascii.el (which came with the org mode distribution).  

This is with org-mode version 7.5.

Scott