I strongly advise people not to upgrade to GCC 4.1. Kernel 2.4 will _NOT_ build with this version of GCC (nor will ALSA). I'll keep my eyes open for a solution, but for now I suggest adding the following to /etc/portage/package.mask:

>=sys-devel/gcc-4

This will stop portage from upgrading to gcc 4.x. This is going to be the only solution until we get a _fully_ working kernel 2.6 implementation (all that needs doing is the FatX driver - but no one seems interested in doing it).