I just got 1.40 and tried building. I kept having some pieces fail with a complete build, sometimes I had gcc that ran until resources exausted, sometimes the compiler would segfault. Eventaully I tracked it down to the math library. After noticing the many errors from the gch (things like : error _REENTERANT not defined or used diffrent -fpic). I disabled pch for the math library (actually the boost project and the libs/math/test) and I did not have any more issues.
Can you be more specific about the error messages? A: bjam --with-math will build just the math lib, if you could post the complete output that would be most helpful. There's something strange going on here though as it builds just fine locally here (ubuntu Linux), and on our regression test machines (various Linux flavours). Thanks, John.