As I couldn't simply leave it alone, I now have the compressed version working properly too: turns out it was programmer error as I was clueless about using zlib. This is the offending code should anybody be interested. It's probably crap and may well have bugs lurking as I rewrote it so many times to try to get it working and I now have too much of a headache to properly sanitise it. It also doesn't compile on Linux (at least not mine) because of either an old compiler or flags that I really can't be bothered to figure out: when I have to start setting things like -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=whatevs I figure life's too short.

Code
static int copyzfile(filelist_t *fp, FILE *fo)
{
	FILE *fi;
	z_stream zs;
	char filename[BUFSIZ];
	unsigned char deflate_in[DV2_BUFSIZ], deflate_out[DV2_BUFSIZ], *ptr;
	int zr;
	int bytes, bytesin = 0, bytesout = 0, zbytes, flush = Z_NO_FLUSH;

	snprintf(filename, sizeof(filename), "%s/%s",
		fp->f_dir->d_name, fp->f_name);
	if(!(fi = fopen(filename, "r")))
		syserror("unable to open %s for reading", filename);
	memset(&zs, 0, sizeof(zs));
	zs.zalloc = Z_NULL;
	zs.zfree = Z_NULL;
	zs.opaque = Z_NULL;
	if((zr = deflateInit(&zs, DV2_COMPRESSION)) != Z_OK)
		error("deflateInit failed: %d", zr);
	while(flush == Z_NO_FLUSH) {
		bytes = fread(deflate_in, 1, DV2_BUFSIZ, fi);
		bytesin += bytes;
		zs.next_in = deflate_in;
		zs.avail_in = bytes;
		if(feof(fi))
			flush = Z_FINISH;
		do {
			zs.next_out = deflate_out;
			zs.avail_out = DV2_BUFSIZ;
			if((zr = deflate(&zs, flush)) < Z_OK) {
				if(zs.msg)
					warn("deflate error: %s", zs.msg);
				error("deflate of %s (%d bytes) failed: %d",
					filename, bytes, zr);
			}
			for(zbytes = DV2_BUFSIZ - zs.avail_out,
				ptr = deflate_out;
			    zbytes;
			    zbytes -= bytes, ptr += bytes, bytesout += bytes)
				if(!(bytes = fwrite(ptr, 1, zbytes, fo)))
					syserror("fwrite(3) failed for %s",
						filename);
		} while(zs.avail_out == 0);
	}
	if(ferror(fi))
		syserror("fread(3) of %s failed", filename);
	fclose(fi);
	if((zr = deflateEnd(&zs)) != Z_OK) {
		if(zs.msg)
			warn("deflateEnd error: %s", zs.msg);
		error("deflateEnd failed: %d", zr);
	}
	if(bytesin != fp->f_size)
		error("%'d bytes does not match declared size of %'d for %s",
			bytesout, fp->f_size, filename);
	debug("deflated %s: orig=%'d, new=%'d",
		filename, bytesin, bytesout);
	return bytesout;
}


J'aime le fromage.