Thanks for the responses.
As it turns out I was running 1.6.2 but a beta release of (2000-11-17).
I've upgraded to the release of (2000-12-25) and things are fine.

Incidentally, building under an SGI/Irix continues to cause problems.
(The configuration script runs but the resultant make has a lot of problems.)

Interestingly a cross build from solaris  works.

1. sun> ./configure --host=mips-sgi-irix6.5 --without-gcc
2. append  
      #define vfork fork
   to config.h
3. and then make under Irix

Since our file systems are nfs mounted it hasn't been much of a hassle.
Just thought I'd mention it in case others had faced similar problems under
Irix. 

Regards,
Raja