ndarkness:
I have seen this other error reported, and I was wondering whether they are related or not. Any advise how to figure it out?
I think so, I remembered that thread when I first started reading your post. Good job doing a search of the forum before posting!
I don't know what the real solution to this issue is but the finding in the other thread was the error is related to the new version of avr-gcc. If you install Arduino AVR Boards 1.6.11 using Boards Manager that should make it work. It would be much better to actually find out how to fix this so that you can use the up to date tool version.