> > One things that occured to me after I posted this was that it could
> > be a memory problem. Could the NMI and the user-level coredumps
> > (plus occasional reboots) be symptoms of memory parity errors ?
> 
> Definitely.  On PCs, NMIs generally indicate memory errors.  If you
> had more than one bad bit, it could easily have manifested as core
> dumps instead.

Swapping the memory has allowed the system to do a make cleandir ... 
make install with no problems.

Might it be worth (if the PC architecture allows and the standards
exist) to make these kinds of NMI a bit more user friendly for the
non-PC hardware people like me ?

Regards,
-- 
Peter Galbavy                                           peter@wonderland.org
@ Home                                                 phone://44/973/499465
in Wonderland                              http://www.wonderland.org/~peter/
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