Anna reported the long-standing (but easily-fixed) RCy cryptic behavior when you call selectNodes with one or more nodes not in the current Cytoscape network.
It used to report:
Failure in convertToR(xmlParse(node, asText = TRUE)) :
faultCode: 0 faultString: Failed to invoke method selectNodes in class tudelft.CytoscapeRPC.CytoscapeRPCCallHandler: null
And now simply warns you, reports the unknown nodes, and selects those nodes which are in the Cytoscape network.
Avaialable tomorrow as version 1.6.5 at
http://bioconductor.org/packages/2.10/bioc/html/RCytoscape.html