Prelink is supposed to fall back to normal linking whenever a library an executable has been prelinked against is changed. This doesn't work in C++ executables. What happened: I prelinked everything on my system, and the basically forgot about it. Several months later, I decided to rebuild the freetype library with the bytecode interpreter enabled. After building and installing the package, prelinked C++ executables which linked to freetype no longer worked. (They died at startup with a message along the lines of "Unknown reloc type: 0x5" -- I know it was a unknown relocation type error, and I'm pretty sure it was 0x5) Undoing the prelink "fixes" the problem, which lead me to undo prelinking everything on my system. This is with prelink-0.2.0-8, and I discovered the problem with xpdf and openoffice before and disabled prelinking entirely.
This should be fixed in glibc-2.3.1-7 and later.