some more info on this:

putting "user AS friend" improves the query, but does not eliminate the problem.

also, here are the version numbers for each sql server:

mysql Ver 12.22 Distrib 4.0.22, for portbld-freebsd4.9 (i386)
mysql.exe Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.24, for Win32 (ia32)

the query even runs fine on a related bsd machine with mysql 5, so the
problem is quite certain to be mysql 4.

hope someone can help!