I'm building on SunOS 5.8 with gcc 3.0.4. I needed to 
recompile 2.2 to add threads for Zope and am not 
having any of the build 'xxx' extensions succeed. My 
original compile with gcc 3.0.2 had succeeded. I've 
tried it with --with-threads and without, same 
results. I downloaded 2.2.1, same results.

Configured with --------------------
 ./configure  --prefix=/ftp/lmp/local

Make output ------------------------

/ftp/lmp/local/src/gnu/python/Python-2.2.1/
 tin/prodfix/dev > make
case $MAKEFLAGS in \
*-s*) CC='gcc' LDSHARED='gcc -shared' OPT='-DNDEBUG -
g -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes' ./python -
E ./setup.py -q build;; \
*) CC='gcc' LDSHARED='gcc -shared' OPT='-DNDEBUG -g -
O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes' ./python -E ./setup.py 
build;; \
esac
running build
running build_ext
building 'struct' extension
gcc -DNDEBUG -g -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -
I. -I/ftp/lmphr/local/src/gnu/python/Python-
2.2.1/./Include -I/usr/local/include -IInclude/ -
c /ftp/lmphr/local/src/gnu/python/Python-
2.Modules/structmodule.c -o build/temp.solaris-2.8-
sun4u-2.2/structmodule.o
gcc -shared build/temp.solaris-2.8-sun4u-
2.2/structmodule.o -L/usr/local/lib -o 
build/lib.solaris-2.8-sun4u-2.2/struct.so
WARNING: removing "struct" since importing it failed

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The release candidate downloaded from SourceForge compiled 
w/o problems. The download with the problems came from the 
www.python.org site.

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Can you please manually invoke the gcc command lines to
build struct? Then please try to import it in the
interpreter, and report any error messages you get in doing so.

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I had the same problem until I added the location of
libgcc_s.so.1 (I don't have gcc 3.0.4 installed in
/usr/local) to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

In my case, this fixed the problem:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/local/lib