Some of the worst error recovery I have yet been exposed to... the message:

uucico: mkdir ('/var/spool/uucp'): No such file or directory
or
uucico: mkdir ('/var/spool/uucp'): Permission Denied

Those quotes seem innocuous, but they are not, they came from the config file.
I mistakenly added the quotes to the spooldir definition and uucico/ini.c
never bothered to check for absolute or legal paths and tried to literally
access '/var/spool/uucp'. Too bad for me ... but I learned a lot about C in
all of this ... and wound up writing my first C program to try and test the
problem ...

thanks for the help and suggestions,
phil