Hi Bill,
I installed OpenSUSE 12.1 (32-bit) in a VMware host, in which I attempted to build 7.8.680. Sure enough, I got the errors that Stephen and Oleksii reported. GDB wasn't able to give me any useful information, as the stack frames were all trashed.
I thought, that seems like maybe a machine-code problem, so I rebuilt with --without-machine-code and sure enough, it built and is currently running the testsuite.
So, the answer is to use the following:
make CONFIGUREARGS="--without-machine-code"
and you should be OK. Please give this a try and let me know if you need any additional information, etc.
Can you try building (recent) Pike 7.9 in the same environment and check if the new machine-code generator in Pike 7.9 solves the problem?
Thanks,
/grubba