Why btowc() function is going into infinite recursion in libstdc++.so.5?

Issue

• Apparent infinite recursion in btowc() function libstdc++.so.5.
• We've got an application that's compiled on SLES 9 using GCC 3.3.3
  and requires compat-libstdc++-33 to run (libstdc++.so.5). It's
  failing with the version of compat-libstdc++-33 included with RHEL 7 compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-71.el7 but works fine when using any
  version of compat-libstdc++-33 from RHEL 6.x