After sweating this problem out today, we finally realized that all of
the "good" directories have no parent directories in their heirarchy
with more than 100 or so files. Any "bad" directory seems to a parent
somewhere along the line with LOTS (100s) of directory entries. For
example things will run while in "/u" but not in "/u/myhome". "/u"
has 800+ entries, while it's parent "/" has only 30. Sounds like an
AIX problem, someone knowledgeable suggested a corrupted file system.
I do know that I've aged several years in the past few weeks. lol
Thanks

What's really interesting is that the "good" directories all have no
parent directories in their hierarchies with lots (over 100 say)
directory entries. The "bad" directories all have a parent somewhere
along the line with LOTs of directory entries (100s). You can c4gl
things in "bad" directories, as long as there's no database code
(display "hello world" works just fine). We've got someone checking
out possible AIX problems (corrupted file system, running out of
inodes, etc). After scanning newgroups and talking to several
consultants, it seems like we have a really unique problem, probably
(like you said) because of the silliness of running a 13 year old
product on a new server/OS. But that part's out of my hands.
Thanks..