Markus: Thanks again - still no luck. testcd passed ok. Completely clueless at this point.

mzilikazi: Maybe it was never meant for this, but it works great in every other respect in my experience, and of course, there are 2 install scripts included on the disk I'm writing this on another machine with a 3.2 install.

I've never had any issue compiling it before. According to the how-to's out there, it has everything that's required for the compile, version-wise as well. I've never used "dist-upgrade", never had a reason; I always upgrade app-by-app.