RMS File statistics and Hein's RMS_STATS program, all zeroes at times

Still working on determining the cause of the sporadic severe slowdown issues with a particular batch job and have run into another issue.
We're trying to get RMS stats from one of the files.  We have a monitor batch job that snapshots info about the problem batch job; that monitor batch job uses Hein's RMS_STATS program to dump them twice, once just before the start of the problem batch job, and once right after it completes.  I don't want to risk using the option to zero the counters on the production system and file so we need before and after.
So the issue is, the output of RMS_STATS in the batch job looks correct but all the counters are always zero (0).
I can do
      RMS_STATS -c -o=a DKA2:[DIR1.DIR2]FILE.DAT
interactively and I'll get the expected output, with counters climbing on subsequent runs.
If I temporarily disable stats I'll get the warning from RMS_STATS as expected; it is looking at the same correct file either way.
The problem batch job is run under a normal user account.  The monitor batch that does the system analyzer snapshots (to watch for 'busy' file channels) and tries to use RMS_STATS is currently running as SYSTEM, but we've tested it under our priv'd maintenance account also.  No difference in behavior.
And I can run the intaractive command under our maintenance account OR as SYSTEM and in both cases get real and incrementing counters back, not just zeroes.
Any thoughts?