Thank you to Luigi, Taco, Hans, and Aditya for all your help and suggestions. As it turned out Taco's suggestion of an old format was right on and Aditya's reassurance that the Ubuntu repositories were not at fault I found some old format files in my home directory that TexExec was seeing before finding the correct ones in the texmf tree. Now it seems I'm ready to start my journey into the world of ConTeXt. Thanks again, Ernesto