[fudster]

Thanks Tim for your reply.

That definitely isn't working here. Again, I'm new to AppleScript, so to determine how far my script is getting, I'm putting "display dialog" statements in. Given:

... beginning of script omitted
tell quick entry
    display dialog "about to execute activate"
    activate
    display dialog "still executing after the activate call"
    ... code to add new task
end tell

or, more like your snippet:

... beginning of script omitted 
display dialog "about to execute activate"
activate quick entry
display dialog "still executing after the activate call"
... code to add new task

... there are no error messages, but the "still executing" dialogs do not show and the work of adding the tasks does not get done. And this was working as recently as yesterday.

I'll keep digging, but I don't even know where to start looking for what might have happened

I was actually doing some scripting yesterday around the time this stopped working, trying to write a script that adds to the notes for a task and deleting some subtasks - you don't suppose I broke something permanently by messing around with AppleScript do you? I'd expect to be able to do some damage to my data, but not to the app...