malloc problem/question in 2.1.3

[David Ronis <ronis at ronispc dot chem dot mcgill dot ca>]

I have a program that repeatedly uses strdup to malloc and copy some
small strings (each 9+1 char's long), does some computations, and then
frees the strings.   It works for a while (I estimate that it has 21
calls to strdup/free)  but ends up
SIGSEGV'ing.   The same code compiled under solaris works fine, and
running under their debugger with leak detection turned on shows no
leaks.

The debugger backtrace (ddd/gdb) shows that

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x407798e0 in chunk_alloc (ar_ptr=0x40803fa0, nb=16) at malloc.c:2763
2763 malloc.c: No such file or directory.

#1  0x4077978c in __libc_malloc (bytes=10) at malloc.c:2696
2696 malloc.c: No such file or directory.

#2  0x4077e594 in __strdup (s=0x8084b06 "\\Y0\\Y0\\WL") at strdup.c:43
43 strdup.c: No such file or directory.


The program was compiled with gcc-2.95.2 with -O0 -g  (I've also used
agressive optimization options with the same result) on an
i686-linux-gnu box (version 2.2.15 of linux).   I also built glibc here,
using the default configure options [unfortunately I didn't save the
sources, so can't trace the routines any further].

Does this problem ring a bell with anyone?   Any suggestions how I might
track it down (I tried building checker, but couldn't).

Thanks in advance.

David