RHat 6.2 - pthread not recognized?

[Thomas Gagne]

I'm having a problem where _tkinter.so complains it can't find
PyThread_acquire_lock.  Looking around my Python 1.5.2 source files it appears
this symbol should be defined in one of the Modules/*.h files--I'm guessing it
should be thread_pthread.h--but my ./configure script doesn't seem to think it
exists.  Apparently it tried looking for thread_init and didn't find it for
some reason.  Does this make sense to anyone?