For smoe reason when using gzip seperatley (and with tar -zxvf, etc.) gzip will report a crc corruption error. This occurs on everything from linux kernel sources, to just programs people have tarred and gzipped up. I have checked each gzipped file on a SunOS machine with gzip version 1.2.4 (same as on RH6.0) and they have worked perfectly. On some gzipped files, gunzip works just fine, it seems random. Have already checked that the files were downloaded in binary format.
Just for your info, example files which it fails on include linux-2.2.9.tar.gz from ftp.us.kernel.org, it does not fail however on linux-2.2.5.tar.gz.
I downloaded linux-2.2.9.tar.gz from ftp.us.kernel.org and ran "zcat linux-2.2.9.tar.gz > /dev/null" on both i386 and sparc64 architectures successfuilly. Perhaps you have some other problem (possibly hardware on bleeding edge kernel) ... ?