Weird warnings from lots of applications

Here's a sample of the warnings I'm seeing
whenever I start up emacs.  This is -CURRENT
from about two weeks ago with all ports upgraded
within the last week:

   :1: error: scanner: digit is beyond radix - e.g. `style'

   :1: error: unexpected character `\222', expected character `='

   :1: error: unexpected character `{', expected keyword - e.g. `style'

I've seen this with other applications as well
(firefox3, gimp), so it's not an emacs-specific
issue.

 From ktrace, it looks like someone is getting confused
trying to read the current directory (the current directory
at this point is /home/tim/t/foo/barfoo):

  43423 initial thread CALL  open(0x864ca80,O_RDONLY,<unused>0)
  43423 initial thread NAMI  "/home/tim/t/foo/barfoo"
  43423 initial thread RET   open 6
  43423 initial thread CALL  read(0x6,0x864e000,0xfa0)
  43423 initial thread GIO   fd 6 read 512 bytes
        0x0000 7b4b 9200 0c00 0401 2e00 0000 754b 9200 0c00
        ...
  43423 initial thread RET   read 512/0x200
  43423 initial thread CALL  write(0x2,0xbfbfd180,0x4)
  43423 initial thread GIO   fd 2 wrote 4 bytes
        ":1: "
  43423 initial thread RET   write 4
  43423 initial thread CALL  write(0x2,0x28a56d9d,0x7)
  43423 initial thread GIO   fd 2 wrote 7 bytes
        "error: "
  43423 initial thread RET   write 7
  43423 initial thread CALL  write(0x2,0xbfbfd180,0x3a)
  43423 initial thread GIO   fd 2 wrote 58 bytes
        "unexpected character `{', expected keyword - e.g. `style'
        "

Note that the character being warned about is exactly the
first byte in the directory.  This also matches the
obvservation that the exact error message varies depending
on the current directory.

My current theory is that some library is trying to read
and parse an initialization file and opening the wrong
thing, but I'm not having much luck narrowing the exact
library responsible.

Has anyone else managed to narrow this down?

Tim