Davis and Bolz (1974) considered, and to some extent classified, compatible tight Riesz order on the group of all order-preserving permutations of a totally ordered field. Glass (1976) carried out a more general study of compatible tight Riesz orders on ordered permutation groups and, in particular, showed the importance of determining compatible tight Riesz orders on O-primitive ordered permutation groups. However, the general problems of existence and classification of compatible tight Riesz orders on O-primitive ordered permutation groups remained open.

Operators in L2, or more generally, Lp spaces, which are generated by differential expressions, have had extensive study. More recently some authors, in particular Krall [3; 4; 5; 6; 7], Kim [2], and Krall and Brown [8], have studied operators which are generated by a differential expression plus an additional term. This additional term is of the nature of a perturbation of the differential expression by an operator with finite dimensional range. However even if the basic operator is specifically of the form of a finite dimensional perturbation of a differential operator, this is not true of the adjoint, since the boundary conditions which arise on the adjoint are not appropriate to the adjoint of the differential operator alone.

Mares [9] has called a projective module semiperfect if every homomorphic image has a projective cover and has shown that many of the properties of semiperfect rings can be extended to these modules. More recently Zelmanowitz [16] has called a module regular if every finitely generated submodule is a projective direct summand. In the present paper a class of semiregular modules is introduced which contains all regular and all semiperfect modules. Several characterizations of these modules are given and a structure theorem is proved. In addition several theorems about regular and semiperfect modules are extended.