Strange error when starting sawfish-ui

[Brian <oldminer gmail com>]

Greetings,
   I recently found that the machines in my computer
science's computer lab had been rebuilt yet again, this time using
Debian.  Previously they had been running Fedora Core 1.  As
these things go, the new build broke sawfish.  It complained about
a lack of libgmp.  So I downloaded and installed the library under
my home with little trouble.
    Now sawfish runs, but I am unable to launch sawfish-ui.  I'm given the error
 *** Remote sawfish error: (file-error "Permission denied" "/home/me/libexec/sawfish/1.3/i686-pc-linux-gnu/DOC")
    whenever I raun sawfish-ui from the terminal. 
(When I try to launch it from a menu Customize->All, it fails
silently.)
    That file's present permissions are owned by me:users with permissions -rwxr-xr-x
    uname -a reports
Linux pie 2.6.8-2-686-smp #1 SMP Thu May 19 17:27:55 JST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
    /proc/version reports
Linux version 2.6.8-2-686-smp (horms tabatha lab ultramonkey org) (gcc
version 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-12)) #1 SMP Thu May 19 17:27:55 JST 2005
    Any ideas?