often times i run distcc on the host machine and when catalyst tries to startup a distcc server of its own, it gets pretty pissed (and usually ends up breaking at the end) that said, there's no reason (that i know of, and lisa backed up on this earlier) for catalyst to start up a server of its own when you run distcc, it takes the configured list of hosts you give it and adds the local machine ... then when it comes to compile, it chooses one of them ... running a server on the local machine and adding it to the list just ends up duplicating it: localhost (added by distcc), localhost (added by catalyst), other machines (added by user)
fixed in cvs, thanks!