Nigoro discovered this little bit of trivia kde-base/kdelibs mozilla mozilla with the mininmal toc patch and glibc 20040605 seems to at least build, kdelibs builds just fine (no minimal toc patch needed). (mozilla still has other issues but it at least builds) however with glibc 20040808 both again fail to build with sig segfaults. yet add minimal-toc into the mix for kdelibs + glibc 20040808 and then it build again. This is odd. Time to experiment with a newer glibc pull perhaps ?
closing this bug. ... I've worked through the issues below. They are not in fact glibc related.
stick a fork in it!