[Orgmode] follow up about date-stamping todos on state change

[Robert Goldman]

I have dug deeper into my problem of the missing date stamps, and it
seems like org is *trying* to insert my date stamps, based on trace output:

1 -> org-add-log-note: purpose=nil
| 2 -> org-store-log-note:
| | 3 -> org-replace-escapes: string="State %-12s %t" table=(("%u" .
"rpg") ("%U" . "Robert P. Goldman") ("%t" . "[2008-10-13 Mon 13:41]")
("%s" . #("\"DONE\"" 0 1 nil 1 5 (face org-done) 5 6 nil)))
| | 3 <- org-replace-escapes: #("State \"DONE\"       [2008-10-13 Mon
13:41]" 0 7 nil 7 11 (face org-done) 11 41 nil)
| 2 <- org-store-log-note: nil
1 <- org-add-log-note: nil

This indicates that the system is correctly composing the string to put
into my buffer, and that it "thinks" it has successfully inserted it.
But it's not ending up in my task list.

Is there anything else that I can do to debug this?

By the way, I find that org is a little difficult to trace because of
the use of &optional --- this seems to badly confuse emacs'
trace-function.  When I tried to trace org-add-log-setup I got eerie
compiler error messages that looked like they came from the bowels of
advice.el.  Is there a workaround for this?  Also, what does it mean to
have two &optionals in a lambda list?

thanks,
r