gawk sending every $0 to the primary output.

[olddurro]

I'm using gawk (under cygwin) to read and parse large .XML files. My main print statements are directed to files but gawk is sending every $0 of the input file to the primary output (the screen in this case); which makes it impossible to see the few print outputs I need to see to judge progress.
Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening (other than a stray print($0) statement.

Smaller awk test programs work correctly when reading the same .xmls.

the call is:

gawk -f myprog.awk *.xml