Aspell 0.60 and mutt

[Wayne Topa <linuxone@intergate.com>]

Hello Users

  In an effort to clean up my mail spelling/typos I am trying to get
  aspell working with mutt, without much luck, it seems

  I googled for how it 'should' be set up but none of the methods works
  here. ie: 

set ispell='aspell \
   --language-tag=`echo $LANG|sed "s/\.[^.]*$//"` \
   --encoding=`echo $LANG|sed "s/^[^.]*\.\?//"` \
   --mode=email \
   --add-email-quote=%,#,:,} \
   --check'
or

macro compose i '<enter-command>set ispell="aspell --language-tag=en -c --mode=email" <enter><ispell>' 'Run aspell with English dictionary'

or even the simple 

set ispell="aspell -e -c"

Each, tried seperately in .muttrc. does not bring up the text in
the compose menu.  Hitting 'i' does cause the screen to junp, or if
I change the "--encoding=`echo $LANG|sed "s/^[^.]*\.\?//"`" to 
--encoding=en_US, I get an error message flashing so fast you can't read it.

Is anyone able to get this version of aspell (0.60.2+20050121-1)
working with mutt (1.5.6-20040907+3) or should I just give up and 
go with ispell?

Wayne