Tiger Shapefile tiling problem

[Jeff Portwine]

I wanted to create a single layer for several states worth of Tiger
shapefiles, and I remembered a thread a few weeks ago about using tiles to
accomplish this.   I tried to follow the advice given then but I am having a
few problems.   First of all, i'm running mapserver with a debian install
and it seems that this install did not include tile4ms.   However, I had
previously installed mapserver under windows xp and I found that I do have
the windows binary for this utility so that's what I tried to use.

I used the command:
tile4ms data_dir.in tiger-roads
where "data_dir.in" was a list of all the tiger .shp files with the full
path to those files.
If my file list does not include file extensions,  I get an error that looks
like this:

Aborted. Unable to open DBF:c:\tiger\all\CT_Fairfield_County
Processed 0 of 1 files

If the file list includes either the extension .shp or .dbf, I get the
following errors:
Aborted. DBF fields do not match for
file:c:\tiger\all\VT_Orleans_County_Poly.shp
Aborted. DBF fields do not match for
file:c:\tiger\all\VT_Rutland_County_Poly.shp
Aborted. DBF fields do not match for
file:c:\tiger\all\VT_Washington_County_Poly.shp
Aborted. DBF fields do not match for
file:c:\tiger\all\VT_Windham_County_Poly.shp.....


Can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to properly use the tile4ms
utility?

Thanks,
Jeff