[RedCherry]

Got a reply from G-support--
"Thank you for your note. We understand that you're concerned about your site, www.------.com. Unfortunately, we are unable to send personal responses to all of the requests we receive to review individual website content.

Certain actions such as buying or selling links to increase a site's PageRank value or cloaking - writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users - can result in penalization. Please review our quality guidelines at http:// www. google .com/webmasters/ guidelines.html for more information. If you identify problems with your website and make the changes necessary to comply with these guidelines, please do not hesitate to contact us.

We are sorry that we cannot provide individual assistance at this time.

Regards,
The Google Team"

My site was not a directory. It *was* the recipient of a site wide link on another banned site. Perhaps the filter penalized both the "sellers" of links and the "buyers" of same. In my case, these were two sites I owned each with unrelated, non-duplicate content, so it was natural to link from one site to the other. No links were bought or sold (sic)

Here was one post on that thread that someone got a reply from google. FYI