OK, well, as someone who knows how dirty a windows registry can get, especially if you have ever had AOL installed then ran its uninstall and then looked at your registry and saw the 200 or so AOL references still in there, you know how I now feel about what I have done.
Well, sorta.
OK, after having already 'configured' gcc in chapter 6 and then getting to the problem in ./configure'ing ncurses, I went back and deleted the 2 directories gcc-build and gcc-3.2.1. I then repeated chapter 6.15. I assume that the intial 'configure' modified, moved, created, etc., a lot of other files. So, now I am also assuming that deleting the 2 directories and starting over will simply overwrite or ignore any files that are affected.
Anyway, after re-doing gcc, the ncurses part configured with no error. So, apparently something was amiss with my 'tree', since I stepped back through my command line entries and didn't see any typos.
So, now, hopefully, the gcc part is set and happy, and the redo didn't hose up anything that will cause more problems on down the road.
regards...
(oh, also, my search did hit a couple of those ncurses 'returns' but there were no obvious solutions in there, just that the user probably screwed up something, as you stated, "probably made a mistake during chapter6-gcc", which, of course, did repeat the definition of my problem.)
Edit: And
thanks for pointing me to the problem as being in the chapter 6 gcc. That was where the problem occurred after all.