[tex-live] Questions regarding glossaries on TeX-Live on Windows

[Jonathan C. Day]

This seems to be a particularly evil bugbear, so I fully understand those hiding under the desks. Especially after the mention of Windows.

Here's the basic set of includes I'm using for the document I'm writing:

\documentclass[letterpaper,oneside]{memoir}

\usepackage{algorithm}
\usepackage{algorithmic}
\usepackage{amsgen}
\usepackage{biokey}
\usepackage{cite}
\usepackage{colortbl}
\usepackage{float}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[xindy,toc,acronym]{glossaries}
\usepackage{ifthen}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage{listings}
\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{multirow}
\usepackage{scalefnt}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage{times}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage{xy}

So far, so good. I'm also using booktabs, but that's emulated by memoir (along with a few other packages), so use the built-in versions.

The moment I try to define glossary entries in the preamble, I get the dreaded message that \begin{document} is needed.

Ok, there's a reference to such a bug in glossaries and it mentions that it's usually caused by an out-of-date package. Some greps later, it looks like I'm using the latest version and that no warning of package versioning is in the log. tlmgr shows I'm running the latest of everything. (I check once or twice a day, depending on free time.)

Neither Google nor Tex-Live's FAQ nor quick attempts to hack round the bug did any good.

My first question is:

Are there workaround packages (either supplied via tlmgr or by simply FTPing them) that will fix the problem?

Since there doesn't seem to be a major outcry over glossary-related bugs, it seems likely that there's an (undocumented) package clash - are there packages (or document classes) that just won't work with glossaires, no matter what?