unresolved symbol errors

[Mike Morasky <mikem wetafx co nz>]

I've been working with gtk and pygtk just fine for months and then suddenly
(for no "apparent" reason) I've got some conflicting .so problems that have
effected all my gtk based tools.
This message is from gimp but is the same for all my gtk tools:

157741:gimp: rld: Error: unresolvable symbol in gimp: __register_frame_info
157741:gimp: rld: Error: unresolvable symbol in gimp: __deregister_frame_info
157741:gimp: rld: Fatal Error: this executable has unresolvable symbols

It seems as though it's probably something common and simple.
Anybody seen this one?