28) TeX and LaTeX are hyphenating words weirdly. What can I do?

    You have a version mismatch problem. The hyphenation algorithm changed
    between version 2.9 and 3.0. If you are using TeX version 3.0 or
    later, make sure you have plain.tex and lplain.tex files with a
    version number of at least 3.0.

    For those of you curious about the change, here's what happened:
    in versions of TeX before 3.0 the hyphenation algorithm would not
    break a word if the part before the break was not at least two
    characters long, and the part after the break at least three 
    characters long. Starting with version 3.0 two integer parameters,
    \lefthyphenmin and \righthyphenmin, control the length of these
    fragments. These are set to 2 and 3, respectively, in the new
    plain and lplain formats. They can be set to any value, of course,
    but if \lefthyphenmin + \righthyphenmin is greater than 62, all
    hyphenation is suppressed.