Hi Bruce, I deleted bert's ?.sphere.reg files and reran the registration with the IRIX binary on an SGI. This time, it ran without a hitch with viewlog showing [mris_register -curv -w 0 ?.sphere ?.average.tif ?.sphere.reg] running in the background.
So, the problem I am having seems to be specific to the Linux binary-unless I made a mistake along the way. Thanks, Brian