I believe that you're observing the problem; it's just that I can't debug it here, since I don't observe the problem here. I just now tried it with CentOS 6.4 x86-64, and it worked fine there too.
For the PATH problem, one possibility is that your shell is buggy, and isn't respecting PATH properly. You might be able to debug this with sh -x. For the problem with 'less' it could be a problem with your 'LESS' environment variable, or something like that. Perhaps if you use "strace -f -o /tmp/trace sh -c 'make check | less'" you'll be able to figure it out.
