Ok, I've tracked down which revision caused the problem. It happened in rev 1104160. Stefan2 made a change to utf.c to speed up UTF8 conversion. Ever since this change went in I am seeing subversion crash when I compile on 64bit el4.
Just for kicks and giggles I updated to the HEAD revision of http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk. Did a reverse merge on rev 1104160, cleaned up the conflicts and built it and viola! No more crashing when built on 64bit el4. -Mike