Frank

Agreed, but there is no official patch for Rails 2.0.x. Disabling XML parsing is only a temporary solution until the entire app can be updated to a version of Rails that is still maintained.

I can't think of a consistant method to check if a helper spec is "empty", especially not by counting lines.

You could configure RSpec, in application.rb, to not create these files:

config.generators do |g|
  g.test_framework :rspec,
    fixtures:         false,
    view_specs:       false,
    helper_specs:     false,
    routing_specs:    false,
    controller_specs: true,
    request_specs:    true
end