Trying to bootstrap my project, distcheck doesn't configure

[Bruce Korb]

So in the years since I last rebuilt my project, it seems the world
has changed. I spent two days pounding on configury stuff just to get
it to the point where bootstrapping once again succeeds and the
project built and ran "make check". With more fiddling, I got it to
roll up a distribution, but the "make distcheck" tries to make
dependencies before having done the configure step. It doesn't work.
So my question:

Why would the distcheck rules fail to do configure as soon as the
tarball is unrolled?
What should I be looking for?

Thank you!

Regards, Bruce