Shut down Pegasus, used Notepad, success.  Problem solved, thanks.

I'm wondering if there's a way to move several rules at a time to a different location in the filter rule list - in effect, a cut and paste.

Specifically, I have a bunch of spam rules at the end of the list, but they should be at the beginning.  Moving one-by-one is too tedious.  I tried editing WINRULES.PMC in Wordpad, but it had no effect.

WINRULES.PMC should be editable with a text editor.  I would use Notepad instead of Wordpad to insure no formatting but using Wordpad and saving as plain text should work. 

What do you see that indicates your edit attempt had no effect? 

Are you certain you edited the one in your new mailbox directory? 

Seems to me the editing was done while Pegasus Mail was still running. I usually shut it down before hacking its files tough I remember editing some rules while it was active. Not sure if it was a general rule set or else.