I'm sorry I don't have the error message any more, but I can tell you how to recreate it. (I'm using gentoo, but this problem has to do with wx calls so its probably crossplatform. This applies to VLC 0.8.2 and up.)
In wxWidgets setup.h there is an option for USE_STL. This defaults to 0, but if you set it to 1, the wxList, wxArray, wxString, etc classes become wrappers around the STL.
In playlist.cpp there (line 1200ish, or 1600ish) there is a line to declare an instance of wxMenuItemList::Node. With STL enabled the wxList class (and thus wxMenuItemList) no longer has a Node member. This causes a compiler error.