My problem was that I manually symlinked the Go binaries into one of the bin folders in my path (I'm not sure which it was). When I ran Go directly from the directory it was compiled to, everything ran as expected. I suspect Go has some configuration that uses relative paths which break because it doesn't know the active directory is different than the installation directory.

This was the only thing I've ever used Go for, and have not used it since, so unfortunately I can't give you any more specifics.

I'll add that once you compile successfully, you can move the "client" and "wallet" binaries to wherever you want, and they run fine. So, if the Go installation path bothers you, you're not restricted to the default. I've even copied my binaries to additional machines (same hardware) without problems, so I only ever had to install Go on one machine.