babel parameters french and frenchb cause compile error

Question

 \documentclass{minimal}
%\usepackage[french,english]{babel}  %ERRORs
%\usepackage[frenchb,english]{babel}  %ERRORs
\usepackage[english]{babel}
%===================              END PREAMBLE                =============
\begin{document}
Using either french or frenchb as babel parameters produce compilation errors:
!Undefined control sequence - abbreviations, disallowuchyph, overfullhboxmark, 
tabbingaccents, automaticlettrine.

Having worked with the parameter set [greek,russian,ngerman,frenchb,spanish,italian,
portuguese,english] in babel for a number of years without any issues whatsoever, 
this comes unexpected. 

What brought it on? I wished to experiment with the minted package, loaded it under 
my MiKTeX2.9 distribution, then abandoned again as it appeared that minted also 
required python-pygments and a Linux distribution rather than my MiKTeX/Windows. 
The end result is the error described above, which persists even after deleting 
minted from MiKTeX.

Totally puzzled!

\end{document}