old age problem with LVM

I have a server running SLES9 that refuses to scan in LVM drives. The server is old and has probably had many hands on it... so when i try to run a filter with no remove expressions in lvm.conf, and then run vgscan -vv , i see quite a few devices like /dev/loop and /dev/ram, but none of my block devices. If I run a wide open filter of a|/*./ , then vgscan gives me... missing ')' in regular expression missing ')' in regular expression Parse error in regex Couldn't parse regex

Does anyone know how I can track down what expression has the missing ) ?