Hi,
BTW: Have you tried to also look at what ulimits are set on your system?
I've rebooted the system and things are really getting better (even Sun's "ar" seems to be working now).
This was a kernel problem, the kernel is not up-to-date with patches and the workstation hadn't been rebooted for months. There were only 30-40 processes running, eating less than 300 Mb, but the system was nevertheless reporting only a few Mb RAM+swap left.
I'm also using --with-gnu-as and --with-gnu-ld now. At some point these were required or made a difference on HP-UX only as far as I can recall; I hadn't noticed they were now required or making a difference on Solaris too.
-- Dimitri
