Spell check worked fine under pine-4.10 (or whatever came with 6.2). After upgrading to pine-4.30-1.62 via the Errata RPMs, the spell checker always terminates with: [ Alternate speller abnormally terminated (255) ]
Probably caused by the fact that /etc/pine.conf defines 'aspell' as the spelling program but that only started shipping in RHL7...
Previous versions of Red Hat Linux used "ispell" as the spell checker, however Red Hat Linux 7.0 uses a new spell checker called "aspell". The new errata pine package is configured correctly for Red Hat Linux 7.0, but incorrectly for previous versions. You can correct the problem yourself by editing the master pine configuration file /etc/pine.conf and changing the line near the bottom that says "speller=aspell --mode=email check" to just read "speller=".
This is fixed in rawhide currently, and an errata will be released soon for 6.x and 5.x to address other issues that will contain the fix as well.