> problem solved!

It's just a workaround
I just can't imagine what's the cause of this behaviour...

attributes/user permissions for the file.

If you are running the program as a regular user, not as "root", and say you are in your home directory and your user name is for example "tony", type:
chown tony:bin mencodeME
or:
chown tony:tony mencodeME
and also, type:
chmod 755 mencodeME

Your program should now run (at user level), without any Seg. faults.

-kwag

The "-" loads all the root enviroment variables. I don't know how exactly this is related to the problem. :?