You misunderstood my point. If you're at your wits end, punt and make the call to the closest available guru (the sysadmin, a veteran C programmer, someone who's been doing *NIX since 3B2's roamed the land . . .) and get their input on the situation. Or mail the exact error message and your platform details to the module maintainer and see if they've seen it before.

At a minimum take an hour or so break and do something completely different, then come back and take a look at the problem fresh; very often what's wrong will jump out at you within minutes of taking it back up again. If not, then seek help elsewhere.