Zlib on my AMD64 machine causes problems with compiling software sometimes. This is because I am using Debian but tried to compile zlib from source; when I installed it, something did not work very well with the rest of my system. So, occasionally, I will have a zlib error.

I recently tried to compile wireshark and Make complained that zlib.a returned a bad value. I noticed that wireshark was looking for zlib in /usr/local/lib/. My Debian stock system put zlib in /usr/lib/ (I think).

"usr/local/lib/libz.a: could not read symbols: Bad value"

Fortunately, `configure` for wireshark had --disable-usr-local option. Everything worked out with that option and it compiled fine.