ok, ok, ok. my little mystery is solved!
i'm posting this belated solution in the hopes that it
might help someone in the confused state i was once in.
JAVA_HOME, JAVAHOME, JAVA_PATH,... doesn't matter what
you call it. as of sdk1.3, it doesn't even seem to be
required anymore.
cindy gave me the clue when she wrote:
setenv JAVAHOME /home/linden/jdk1.2
a ha! jdk1.2. looking back through my books on the matter,
i now noticed that the only referring to JAVA_HOME
or JAVAHOME (JAVA_PATH evidently being a product of my
fevered imagination) were pre sdk1.3!
anyhoo, i tossed that one line from my .bash_profile
and everything compiles and runs just peachy---just as
it did before with that extra, unused environment variable.
cheerio!