hmm, i just had another look at my nqpoly~.pd thing, and noticed that it had been broken by an edit that i did just before i posted it.
nqpoly~-test stil openened, and would make some noise, but would spit out some errors about broken connections... but i'm not quite sure what the symptoms of the bad wiring would be...
anyhow, this one should work (objects had shifted around in the .pd file, and so the self-references were pointing in the wrong places).
pix.