I've been tracking down some issues with GCC 3.2/3.3 on Sparc, and it turns out that there's a known bug in these compilers which affects us. See my bug report here: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11252 which is a duplicate of the original bug, here: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7871 The upshot appears to be that global register variables are broken on GCC 3.2+. So far this hasn't affected us on x86 (fingers crossed), but it certainly shows up on Sparc. If you're on a Sparc box, stick to GCC 2.95 for now. I'll try to get an idea from the gcc folks of when this might be fixed. Cheers, Simon