No rule to make foo.cpp needed by foo.o ???

[David Holmes - Sun Microsystems]

I'm doing a build and get a compilation error in foo.cpp, so I fix the 
problem that caused the error and make then aborts with

"No rule to make target 'foo.cpp' needed by 'foo.o'. Stop"
I have to do a clean and then re-build to get past this.

This is building hotspot on linux and the make version is 3.81

This is driving me nuts and wasting a lot of time!

Anyone got any idea why make is doing this? It is as-if it can't find 
the updated cpp file. Could it be a timestamp issue?

Thanks,
David Holmes