Problem resolution – for anyone interested.
The problem was finally solved by -Bsymbolic, but it was in a roundabout way.
We are working on HP and when we ran into the problem we were compiling with gcc. We tried adding –Bsymbolic to the gcc command but it didn’t help. We then tried adding –W1,Bsymbolic in order to pass the option to the linker, but this didn’t help either.
Now we have moved to compile with HP’s native aCC, for reasons that are unrelated to this problem. With aCC when we gave it –W1,Bsymbolic the library’s symbols were finally taken locally.