to whomever it concerns .....

It turns out that egcs 1.1 really _does_ misbehave on native
netbsd/mips boxes exactly as Castor Fu described.  (I had an old
libcc1 sharedlib from an earlier netbsd egcs import still installed).

Re-building libcc1 from 
	    gcc version egcs-2.91.57 19980901 (egcs-1.1 release)

reproduced the problem.

Castor's suggestion, to back out the delta from expr.c, also fixes
the problem for me on a Decstation 5000/150 (r4000 mipsel).