Problems installing Gentoo from Stage 1, and 3.

Hello, for the past year I've been trying to get gentoo installed on my system with little or no luck at all.
I installed a stage 3 system on my sister's laptop with no problems, and it ran gnome without a hitch, so I know I"m doing things right.
But for some reason, everytime I try to run "emerge -e system" I get a compilation error when it's trying to install perl, or gettext, or help2man, or any other combination of programs; but it's never the same program twice.

Am I plagued to never used gentoo on my own system? Tonight I'm going to re-do my computer from the ground up since windows and Gentoo are both royally pissing me off right now. Should I try another Linux distro? The main reason I love Gentoo so much is it's flexability, but I have yet to run gnome on my current system.

Comp Specs:
Asus A7N8X Deluxe
AMD 2500 Barton
ATI 9800pro
2x512MB Kingston HyperX
120GB WD ATA hdd
80GB SATA hdd
40GB SATA hdd

I'm wondering if there is something wrong with using an ATI card, but it's fairly old so I'd assume it has semi-good support.

Also, does Gentoo have good support of the Intel Pentium D processor, I'm about to build a new comp and I can't decide between Intel and AMD.

[edit] When I did a stage 3 install everything worked fine until I tried to get into X, which failed every time. Is my computer doomed to never run Gentoo?

well you have to take the good with the bad and the good is that gentoo is highly configurable and allows the end user to change, modify, add, delete many things but the bad is that many of those things are your responsibility so if you don't do it right or at all something might not work. My advice is to get an account on forums.gentoo.org and to check out the documents section of the gentoo website for info on ati, X, GCC and many other useful things.

If you have problems with emerging a certain package then your best bet is to search for that program and an emerge error on the forums or check out bugzilla for any known problems.