app is subtly but totaly broken by removing API functions unless we use the
magic button. Depending on the architecture the code may work or crash horribly
without this. OK sthen@ (there are similar hacks in many other apps)
this took a lot of debugging (on sparc64 where it breaks) for such a stupid bug.
pointed out by henning
(and i'm going to go and fix more of those after i relax)