stymied by default update

[John Turner]

Greetings,

Still learning the ropes here -
1) the head commit to my new repo was an add of 655 files
2) the next changeset was an add of 5 files
3) the next changeset added 2 ignore patterns to .hgignore which wouldn't  
affect the existing files in the repo - only unadded files currently  
sitting in the working directory

Now when I run hg update, it only loads 5 files into the working directory  
even though my .hgignore is only set to exclude .rpt files (a very small  
percentage of files which haven't even been added to the repo yet)

What happened to the other 655 files?  I never ran hg remove...
And even though I can call them up with "hg update 0" I can't 're-commit'  
them...

(incidentally, it shows a break between the head changeset and changeset  
1.. this seems to be a clue)

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
John