"Mike Henry" wrote in message
...
Thanks for all the suggestions.

As it turns out there is a GFCI in a bathroom adjacent to the garage
that
had tripped and which apparently feeds the garage outlet. The GFCI
outlet
is not used so we never noticed that it was tripped.

I got off on several tangents in trying to troubleshoot this. This
is a
townhome that we purchased new and it looks like the electricians
did a
fairly decent job (wires screwed to receptacle terminals) and there
were no
worries about what another owner might have done. Aside from not
remembering the bath room GFCI, the main problem was that I couldn't
figure
out which breaker was supplying power to the garage outlet and
didn't want
to pull the receptacle until I was sure that the wires were
unpowered. The
main panel breakers are labeled but a bit more obtusely than I would
have
liked. There is a "garage" CB but it turns out to be on a different
circuit
and the correct one is labeled only "GFI". I got sidetracked by a
GFCI in a
utility room which seemed to be a logical tie point for the garage
outlet
parttially because I noticed my wife had partially painted over the
recptacle slots. That was a red herring.

At one point I decided to check voltages from the outlet to hots
and
neutrals on a known good circuit. I was getting 12-13 VAC on the
hot &
neutral from one pair of wires to the outlet and 68-72 VAC from the
other
pair of hot/neutral wires. Is that normal?

Did you use a digital voltmeter to measure this by any chance?