Did what you asked, I also did one other thing, I completely removed libsafe from my system. Now aliascombine doesn't fail, but aliascreate does.

Here is aliascombine.log and makealiases.log from strace.

Another thing that is new is that in /tmp dir files courier.(random) are now created, but are 0 bytes. I found these files in the strace logs.

# ls -l courier.* -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:35 courier.8H03oa -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:35 courier.8HKUla -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:35 courier.9HK3Mb -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:36 courier.cwKJob -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:37 courier.CWZRjc -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:36 courier.gwKA-a -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:36 courier.gwKN8a -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:32 courier.KQvU9a -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:33 courier.Pcv6Vb -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:32 courier.sr2gIb -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:32 courier.srg6Kb -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:32 courier.trgBna -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:33 courier.VcfSOd -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:33 courier.VcLULd -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:37 courier.zWtvkc -rw------- 1 root root 0 2003-09-21 21:37 courier.zWZgxc