SCO 286 Xenix spell bombs

[Earl H. Kinmonth]

In the course of recovering from damage to my XENIX partition caused
by Norton under MSDOS (the fixed version still can screw up XENIX), I
reinstalled XENIX.  After I did so, the first time I ran spell, I got
the results below

table = malloc(0xc848) fails
sbrk(0) = 0x3868
spell: cannot initialize hash table
spell: 5791 Killed

Several hours of diddling revealed that this did NOT occur when I ran
spell as root.  Thinking this might be a setuid problem, I ran
fixperm.  No luck.  I then tried playing with the permissions by hand.
No luck.  

I finally remembered what I had done the first time I had installed
80286 SCO Xenix and encountered this problem.  I dug out my 8086 Xenix
and installed the spellprog and related files from it.  This cured the
problem.

Is there a more "elegant" solution?