Small troubles in startup

[John Daschbach <d3h486 at wd19518 dot emsl dot pnl dot gov>]

I have been trying guile for some simple projects in place of scm.
Mostly it is going well, but I have some questions about startup.
I usually do something like the following

  gh_new_procedure2_0("thob", thob);
  gh_new_procedure("scmode", scmode,3,0,0);  
  gh_load("tidutil.scm");
  gh_repl(argc,argv);

and then run in the repl, using C functions and scheme utility
functions defined in tidutil.scm.  This is pretty tame guile use, and
I have found it reasonably easy once I converted to using autoconf and
libtool.  

My problem is that while most things loaded from tidutil.scm are
visible in the repl, calls to use-modules seem to not be visible.  I
do the following in tidutil.scm

(use-modules (ice-9 slib))
(use-modules (ice-9 popen))

but nothing defined in these modules is visible in the repl.  I have
to make these calls by hand in the repl.  All of my definitions in
tidutil.scm are visible.  

Is there something simple I'm missing here?

-John