This was starting to seriously bug me and as I had made a fool of myself earlier I spent another hour tracking it down, since I had one working example I want to know what the issue was. (&*)_&^% apple has a old broken version of aclocal in /usr/bin. And my path on the systems that failed had it before the newer version in /opt/local/bin where port installs its wares. With the path changed it works now perfectly. And I feel pretty stupid, but it is resolved.