Segmentation Fault with pear on several machines

[eculp at bafirst.com]

I've been updating all my ports and I started to get segmentation 
faults with pear.  All I have to do is to type pear, let it list the 
options and it finishes with the following error and threatens to open 
a debugger that never opens.

I now have three machines that have the problem.  There is little in 
common between them.  One is a P4 running up to date current, another 
is AMD Athlon also running up to date current and the last is a brand 
new DELL P-4 Server with 2G of ECC memory that I just finished 
installing RELENG_6, php5, php5-extensions, pear, etc. and have the 
same problem.  All the other machines are a couple of years old.  All 
three of the machines are cvsuping, building world, and kernels daily 
with no problems at all.  All the systems libraries, includes, etc are 
up to date.  I have installed world erased all more than a day old and 
re installed world several times in the last few days on the two older 
ones and the dell installation is less than 48 hours old and has build 
and installed world twice.

The simplest way to get the error is to just run the pear command and 
it finishes with the following:

  Type "pear help options" to list all options.
  Type "pear help shortcuts" to list all command shortcuts.
  Type "pear help <command>" to get the help for the specified command.
  Segmentation Fault in 42156, waiting for debugger

I have no idea what could cause the problem and much less, how to 
troubleshoot it.  Google hasn't been my friend, yet, and that worries 
me ;)  Sounds like operator error, but I have no idea how.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

ed

P.S. Versions of software that I have are:

     php5-5.1.4
     pear-1.4.6
         I haven't installed more pear because of the error.