The problem has been resolved and was mostly of my own making.

My original text file had a quotation mark in it but I'd removed it.

However the QUOTES.EXE utility does not replace the rquotes.r file but appends to it and I'd run it several times, at least three of which with the offending quote in place. Once I realised  my error and pared rquotes down the the comment it all worked as it should (once I found a 32 bit version of windows to run them on).

When I try to compile my quotes using rescom I get three errors

Error rquotes.r 4919 unexpected value in text structure (\n")

The other errors are the same save for the numbers 7123 and 9393 

I don't have any quotation marks in the file so the error is rather confusing. Can someone point me in the right direction?

There should be a sample source "rquotes.r" file in the Programs\RESOURCE directory.

The general format of this file is a collection of text
resources; each text resource is a multiline group of
quoted strings, ending with \n wherever you want a line
break.