bitbake emacs failing

[captain.deadly@gmail.com]

Hello all,
    have a strange problem on my system whereby when I try to build emacs the 
Makefiles generated by the configure script have random carriage return 
characters injected into them which makes a mess of the build. This was the 
case for both emacs_22.3.bb and emacs_23.1.bb.

I then decided that I'd stick in a recipe for version 23.2 and edited the 
generated makefiles to remove the new lines to get the package built. I 
eventually hit another problem:

| make[1]: *** No rule to make target 
`/home/john/programming/openmoko/shr2/shr-unstable/tmp/sysroots/armv4t-
oe-linux-gnueabi/usr/lib64/crt1.o', needed by `temacs'.  Stop.

The above error comes from a line in the Makefile generated for the src 
directory:

STARTFILES = pre-crt0.o /home/john/programming/openmoko/shr2/shr-
unstable/tmp/sysroots/armv4t-oe-linux-gnueabi/usr/lib64/crt1.o 
/home/john/programming/openmoko/shr2/shr-unstable/tmp/sysroots/armv4t-
oe-linux-gnueabi/usr/lib64/crti.o

This line is directing the build to a lib64 directory which does not exist. 
The required files do exist in the lib directory so I edited the Makefile again 
to remove the 64.

I guess I've two questions: why would configure make a mess of generating 
Makefiles and is there a problem using a 64 bit machine for openembedded?