Those sound pretty useful, and I will need to try those out. I used (file-name-directory buffer-file-name) as the base for walking the filesystem, which may have caused some issues. I also have a cd in the shell command passed to compile, which probably doesn't play nicely.

Unfortunately, my current job doesn't use Linux as much, and so it has been too long since I've spent time improving my .emacs file, as it is only home projects at this point.