oh sorry, i just figured i should add a few more details:
the shaders i’m trying to run are the ones generated by the auto-shader, not custom ones;
also, we’re running on fedora core 7/9 in the lab;
lastly, i have no idea how exactly Panda was installed, but my guess is that it was compiled from source of the 1.7 release on the website, not the svn build. It was however installed on a common “file server” and not locally on each machine, so that might have something to do with the problem (but i don’t know the specifics of it)