thanks for replying:
no, i have not, but none of the data I use is saved outside a geodatabase typically. we don't use shapefiles as a rule, so that would not have occurred to me, nor would that be a workable solution.
i am not new at GIS, and this is most certainly a very simple task - one i have never had a problem with on any other version - so I'm just baffled! its not a large dataset, one is a pointfile (23 points), one is a polyline (23 lines). is there an issue with versioning between 10.1 and 10.2.2?