"Error: Bad owner/group" while rebuilding src rpm

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday mindspring com>]

  i *know* this has come up before, and i've already skimmed what google
found for me.

  i have a cross-compile toolchain that i'm trying to use to cross compile
a src rpm.  this means that i have a pre-built "rpmbuild" executable that
i don't have the source for at the moment, so i'm kind of limited in that
respect.

  as part of the rebuild process, the first step listed in the docs is to just
do a "prep" step, which sadly fails immediately on trying to unload the 
bzipped tarball.

  i've seen, via google, that the "Error: Bad owner/group" message refers
to the owner/group of the files within the tarball.  but i've tried various
combinations -- i've unloaded the tarball, changed the owner and group
of the contents, and zipped it up again.  changed all those attributes
to root/root.  no difference.

  i've verified that the owner/group correspond to a valid account on this
machine, tried the build both as a regular user and as root, and so on,
with no success.

  i'm naturally limited to the cross-compile version of the rpmbuild 
command, but is there anything else i can try at this point?  what did this
error message used to represent?  thanks for any pointers.

rday