emerge twice works or funny compiling behavior

[pèdratan]

Hi to you all. Maybe this will be a little long.

The problem I've found is more related to gcc than emerge, but it's not similar to the one posted in "Pitfalls of using GCC - 3.2.1-r6"

The problem is the following:
while executing "emerge -u world" compilation ended abruptly with an "illegal instruction" message. Thinking that it was very odd, I repeated the process, only to see that this time worked(!?)
With this "knowledge" i began installing lots of ebeuilds, some of them worked, some of them failed with "illegal instruction", some of them failed with "segmentation fault"being necessary repeting the "emerge..." process at least 3 times., so I thought i had a broken gcc. I remerged it with the defaults flags for an athlon-xp stage3 install. After it and while still trying to install kde, emerging of qt would always fail. So I decided to go to /var/tmp/portage/qt... and execute make by itself, only to discover that when gcc failed to compile something, after executing make again it would compile!
I think is gcc's problem with athlon, because before using gentoo, compiling of mplayer failed, being even the same source I used before in my p3 (the same hdd)
I'm using an AMD AthlonXP 2400, 512 MB RAM, and I know is not hardware (tested it) Anyone else is having similar behavior?
Any suggestion for fixing this. I hope it's not reinstalling from stage 1, but if this works, anything for a working gentoo.
Thanks for help and sorry about possible "engrish"

[wayned]

This happened to me on a box where the processor did not have a fan and it turned out that the processor was overheating. Other folks have noted that gcc 3.2.1 appears to really beat the snot out of a processor even if earlier versions did not overheat on a system. So, you might try some extra processor cooling (such as opening up the case and pointing a fan at it) and see if the problem goes away. If it does, install a more permanent cooling solution.