I think I figured out part of the issue that I (and several others) have 
been experiencing with building on Solaris 9.

When I use only snapshot tools (pre-buit binaries of gcc-2.95.3, 
libiconv, gtexinfo, etc.) I get both a HOST and BUILD system type of 
sparc-sun-solaris2.  When using the gcc-3.3 that I compiled with the 
package tree, the BUILD system type is sparc-sun-solaris.

Does this help anyone?

Thanks!