unbalanced balance sheet

[Mark Johnson]

I just imported some of my wife's Quicken 98 data into gnucash.  This 
gnucash file already had my data in it.  Before I started, the balance 
sheet was balanced.

After I finished, the balance sheet was unbalanced.  I was able to track 
this down to a single transaction.  It is in my wife's share purchase 
plan.  I set this up with an account hierarchy like this:
Asset (type asset)
 - Stephanie (type asset)
   *SPP (type Bank)
      ~CompanyShares (Type Stock)

The SPP accounts holds cash deducted from her paycheck.  Once we receive 
statements telling us how many shares were purchased, we enter buy 
transactions to convert them into shares in the CompanyShares account.

Naturally, I wanted to enter an Opening Balance transaction in the 
CompanyShares account.  The balancing account was Equity:Retained 
Earnings.  However, whenever I enter this single transaction, the 
balance sheet becomes unbalanced.  If I delete the transaction, the 
account is once again balanced.  If I re-enter the transaction, the 
imbalance re-appears.  I tried this several times.  (Not sure why I 
thought that would make a difference. :-)

I tried deleting the CompanyShares account and the commodity for the 
shares.  I re-entered them, and re-entered an Opening Balance 
transaction.  The balance sheet was still unbalanced.

Out of curiousity, I decided to "Jump" to the other side of this 
transaction to see what it looked like in Equity:Retained Earnings.  To 
my surprise, the transaction was there, but all amounts were blank!

Once again, I deleted the transaction.  Once again, the balance sheet 
was balanced.  This time, I decided to enter it from the Equity:Retained 
Earnings register.  Gnucash popped up a dialog noting that the 
commodities for the two accounts were different and asking for an 
exchange rate (or number of shares purchased).  I opted to enter the 
number of shares purchased rather than the exchange rate.

Now, there is no problem.  Both ends of the transaction have amounts.  
The balance sheet balances.

Clearly, there is some sort of bug here.  Is this one anyone else has 
encountered?  If not, I will enter a report.

I am using gnucash 1.8.11 on Slackware 10.0.

Mark