How many Postfix installs have you had on the machine? Perhaps different parts (proxymap, postmap) come from different versions.
Some maintainers have software installed in /usr/sbin etc., some under /usr/local/sbin or even under /opt, and they all expect to have main.cf in different placess. If you use postmap from one kit and proxymap from a different one, then no amount of main.cf tweaking will make things work. With Postfix versions 2.4 and later, commands such as: % strings /usr/sbin/postmap|grep mail_version= will "fingerprint" the executable file. Wietse