Try taking the " ' " out of the hard drive name, ie. re name the hard drive
to "BillsHD" instead of "Bill'sHD" then change this line from:



       open file "Bill'sHD:Users:billsteele:Desktop:foo.txt"



to:



       open file "BillsHD:Users:billsteele:Desktop:foo.txt"


See if that works


if that's not particularly palatable then you could also try (in the script
only):



       open file "Bill\'sHD:Users:billsteele:Desktop:foo.txt"


But I don't know if the \ is the escape character in apple script, someone
here will correct me if i'm wrong.


Dave.


Apostrophes aren't special in AppleScript strings; there's no need to escape
them at
all.   Backslash (\) is indeed the escape character, but it's only legal in
front of double quotation marks (") or another backslash.

If you're using do shell script, "quoted form of" automatically handles
apostrophes correctly (though you're probably better off not looking at the
result :)).