Allout-mode and Planner notes?

I am quite confused by the suggestion in Planner that one can do
something useful with allout.el to hide/show notes in planner buffers,
and that the '.#1 Title' notation somehow facilitates this. 

If I do 'M-x allout-mode<RET>' in a Planner buffer and hit "Hide
Children" in the menu bar, I can hide/show things that start with "*",
but nothing else (not individual notes).  If I start doing 'C-c <spc>
<spc>' and 'C-c <spc> .' to create sibling topics and subtopics (to
see what the syntax should be), and then 'C-c <spc> #' to number the
outline headings, I get things that look like: 

* Notes
;_#1 Title 1
;_#2 Title 2

Evidently the ';_' should be replaced by '.'.  So I set
allout-header-prefix to "." and do 'M-x allout-init<ret>' (as
instructed in the docstring to allout-mode).  I answer a question, the
possible answers to which are murky at best: "Select outline auto
setup mode (activate, aask, deactivate, full, nil, report)?"  Now,
trying to create a note via 'C-c <spc> .' turns this: 

* Notes

into this:

.* Notes
.. 

Thus, I'm heartily confused about how this is supposed to work.  Does
anyone actually use this? 

This is on a G4 Powerbook, OS X 10.4.6, Emacs 22.0.50.1 (CVS ~early
may), Planner 3.40, Muse 3.02.5. 

Thanks,
Greg