Duplicate 'row.names' error reading table. row.names=NULL shifts columns

Question

This is similar to read.csv row.names and to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12425599/duplicated-row-names , but I do not see answers that help.

Problem: Trying

Answer 1

had the same problem. just added this line:

colnames(rec) <- c(colnames(rec)[-1],"x")
rec$x <- NULL