Sorry if this is lame, but it's been a Long Day and I'm wasted. It looks like grub-0.92 has Difficulty with ac-2.54 and am-CVS.
The problem is that grub likes the "old style" of AS rules, and current automake/autoconf Really Want grub to use AM_PROG_AS. Making this change means asm.S no longer assembles because of missing -I directives. After adding them, the resulting asm.o (apparently) has extra/duplicate symbols, so the final link fails. This is from memory, and my memory is a bit fuzzy because I'm multi-tasking several windows with different versions of software in them (and, as I said, I'm tired). H