Re: Problem with plain tex and babel

> hyphenation files had changed by making inessential changes to them  
> (for instance, removing blank lines or spaces). Is there a better way  
> of doing this, or should I just do it by hand using fmtutil?

Use texconfig or texconfig-sys in the following way:
  texconfig init latex
  texconfig init etex

Using fmtutil / fmtutil-sys would be the same:
  fmtutil --byfmt latex
  fmtutil --byfmt etex

Thomas