Failed assertion in iconv/skeleton.c

["David B. Held" <dheld at codelogicconsulting dot com>]

I have some serious problems with glibc-2.2.1.  Unfortunately for me,
they are largely self-inflicted.  I installed glibc with --prefix=/usr
before
reading all the way through the FAQ.  I did so with gcc-2.95.2 (or
thereabouts).  I don't remember the results of "make check", but they
couldn't have been perfect.  Now there are numerous apps that
give me this error:

<appname>: ../iconv/skeleton.c:304: gconv: Assertion 'outbufstart
== ((void *)0)' failed.
Aborted.

I've researched this error for weeks, and have found no answers.
I thought I would be clever, and upgrade to gcc-3.0 and glibc-2.2.3.
Then I discovered that glibc-2.2.3 doesn't compile with gcc-3.0.  I
can live with glibc-2.2.1 if I can make this error go away.  It affects
rpm, which prevents me from re-installing libc-5 from rpm.  And it
would be a big pain to try to recompile glibc-2.2.1 since I would have
to reinstall gcc-2.95; but I will do so if that is the best way to resolve
this situation.  Any ideas whatsoever are gladly welcomed.  This
problem has really frustrated me.

I also get a message from Perl 5 that says:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
            LANGUAGE = (unset),
            LC_ALL = "en_US",
            LANG = "en_US"
        are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

I'm clueless when it comes to locales, and don't have the faintest
idea what I need to look at to fix this message.  I tried playing with
localedef with no success.

I'm running RedHat 6.1 on an i686-pc-linux-gnu, if that helps.  I also
installed BerkeleyDB-3.2, binutils-2.11.2, db-3.2.9, dejagnu-1.4.1,
expect-5.32, gdbm-1.8.0, gperf-2.72., libtool-1.3.5, make-3.79,
and tcl-8.3.2.  I don't know if any of those are relevant or not.  I tried
building perl-5.6.0, but I don't remember if it succeeded or not (I
think the testing resulted in more failures than I was comfortable
with).

Dave