Hello Kyle and All
This problem relates back to an earlier screw-up on my part. I tried to use a SQL statement to load the name, lastname, username fields from another database, and I didn't know exactly how these fields in "comprofiler" and "users" tables interact. The result was that when I synched joomla users with CB comprofiler, the first name field was populated with both first and last names and some were not populated because of accents. Hence, the incomplete list.
While accented words did not load via a SQL statement, they load just fine one at a time.
Anyway, I found my error but it was too late to delete my post; sorry everyone.