Hopefully someone will have some insight to this soon.

I have tried more things to narrow down the problem.

I installed GNU Make 3.81. Same issues.

I removed the javac line from the "all" target in the makefile and replaced it with an echo statement. Everything was happy (but clearly no compilation). I replaced the javac (which points to the 1.6 version of javac) to the explicit path for my 1.5 installation (/usr/java/1.5/bin/javac) and the makefile completed just fine!

So to summerize: I can compile my files just fine on the command line with either version of javac, but can only use 1.5 in the makefile... using 1.6 is causing the system freeze. Now, the simple fix will be to use 1.5 on everything now, but that is quite unsatisfying. If anyone has any insight/advice, I'd love to hear it. Thanks.