I recently built VLC from the git source code on an Intel Macbook running MacOSX 10.5.2. When I start it up I get the main menu bar and a bodyless main window, (it just contains the close/min/max buttons and the title). From the main menu I can bring up all of the other windows, such as messages, the open dialogs, the about dialog, etc. I can even get the playlist window to show up inside the main window, but the controls are all missing.
I realize this is probably some configuration problem in my development environment, but I'm fairly new to Mac development and don't know where to start looking. The message logs don't show any errors when instantiating the "macosx" interface for the player. I checked out the nib files and they appear to have the controls in place.
If it helps, I updated my source code from git on Thursday May 8, 2008.