does anyone know about this strange malloc failure?

[Angus Y. Montgomery]

Running some software that is perfectly OK on another MIPS platform, and
somewhere along the way malloc causes this error:

WARNING: Process [a.out] pid 17019 sent SIGSEGV because it exceeded its maximum 
process/stack size

:it's not the first time that malloc is called in the run.
:the stack and data spaces are both large enough (2^19 Kb) that there
   is no way i can conceive of that this relatively small process
   should run out of space.
:we've tried using the other malloc from <malloc.h> and also using mallopt
   to make sure free-ed memory was still usable in case space was prematurely
   freed

all to (obviously) no avail.
anyone else have/had this problem, a solution, or even a wild guess
could they please tell me.
thanx.
angus at godzilla.cgl.rmit.oz.au