Portupgrade killed everytime

[James Brown]

Whenever I run portupgrade, I wait about 30 seconds only to see it die:

# portupgrade clamav
Killed
# portupgrade vim
Killed

I have a recent cvsup of 'ports-all' on 5.2.1-RELEASE-p9 and have run
'make index' and 'pkgdb -F'.

Someone at bsdforums.org has kindly suggested that I'm seeing a Ruby 
problem, so I tried to do a 'make install clean' on lang/ruby18 (after a 
pkg_delete -r ruby-\*). This failed to build with the following errors:

[...]
===>  Building for ruby-1.8.2.p2_1
cc -O -pipe -march=pentium2  -fPIC -I. -I. -c main.c
cc -O -pipe -march=pentium2  -fPIC -I. -I. -c dmyext.c
cc -O -pipe -march=pentium2  -fPIC -I. -I. -c array.c
cc -O -pipe -march=pentium2  -fPIC -I. -I. -c bignum.c
cc -O -pipe -march=pentium2  -fPIC -I. -I. -c class.c
cc: {standard input}: Assembler messages:
{standard input}:0: Warning: end of file not at end of a line; newline
inserted
{standard input}:1920: Error: unknown pseudo-op: `.p2al'
Internal error: Killed (program cc1)
Please submit a full bug report.
[...]

So, I used 'pkg_add -r ruby-devel' instead.
A 'pkg_info' now shows:

portupgrade-20040701_3 FreeBSD ports/packages administration...
ruby-1.8.1.p2          An object-oriented interpreted scripting language
ruby18-bdb1-0.2.2      Ruby interface to Berkeley DB revision 1.8x...
ruby_r-1.8.1.p2        An object-oriented interpreted scripting language

Unfortunately, still no joy!

If anyone could give me some suggestions, I would really appreciate it.
Many thanks,

James.