Well, actually, when rehashed it made the Windrop part the two dynamic channels.
(Alice Through the Looking Glass syndrome?)
My decision to try under another OS (*BSD instead of RH) has come about because the RH box is an internal Rackspace box and for reasons not glaringly obvious, eggdrop can sometimes behave a little "funky".
In static channels the script is no problem; (apparent) failure of the script to
initialise dynamically allocated channels when the bot enters (which should not under any circumstances require any rehashing) is annoying only, along with the "can't read" message lines in the log.
The RH bot was running netbots minus sentinel and repeat functions. I will test again (as I said) on a "clean" bot on a box I have never had any reason to question.
Special request: Have it knit jumpers (Winter is on the way).