This is going to sound like a really long shot…but can you try the following?
$ readelf -a fail
and look for a GNU_HASH dynamic tag? My guess is that the binary uses GNU_HASH, and your ld.so is too old to understand it. Support for the GNU hash section was added to glibc around 2006, and mainline distros began to be GNU-hash-only around 2007 or 2008. Your Centrino’s glibc is from 2003, which predates GNU hashing.
If the ld.so doesn’t understand GNU hash, it will try to use the old ELF hash section instead, which is empty. In particular, I suspect your crash is occurring at this line in elf/do-lookup.h:
for (symidx = map->l_buckets[hash % map->l_nbuckets];
Since the linker presumably doesn’t understand GNU hashes, l_nbuckets would be 0, resulting in the crash. Note that map is a large structure with around 100 structure elements, and l_nbuckets is around the 90th member of the structure in newer ld.so (0x164 = 4*89, so in older ld.so it is probably precisely this member).
To see if this is conclusively the problem, build with -Wl,--hash-style=sysv or -Wl,--hash-style=both and see if the crash goes away.