corrupted stack - only one level of stack visible

[no]

I am having some trouble viewing the stack in gdb on my Redhat 7.2
linux.

I installed gdb 5.2 (and tried it with 5.1.1 as well).  When I run my
program and view the stack, it only shows me one level of the program
stack
and the rest looks like:
#1  0x0000003a in ?? ()
#2  0x40602c28 in main_arena () from /lib/libc.so.6
#3  0x0805aa28 in ?? ()

Frequently in the one level it shows (#0), the pointers to the
function are 0x0 or corrupted.

This is without core dump as well.  For example, if I tbreak and then
step through some code, I get:
(gdb) where
#0  fcnfromMyExecutable(int, char**) (argc=3, argv=0xbfffdb64) at
file.cpp:329
#1  0xbfffdaf8 in ?? ()
Cannot access memory at address 0x3

I re-installed it - still didn't work.  I checked on a solaris file
with gdb-5.2 and it works just fine.

What am I doing wrong ?