Before I try this I wanted to make sure I won't clobber something.

I always assumed find, xargs, etc. was builtin and part of the kernel but apparently it's not - so if I have Find 4.1 and I want Find 4.4 is there any reason I shouldn't just download, configure and make the newer 4.4 from here http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/

will it just overwrite the existing /usr/bin/find like I want when I do the make install?

Anything special I have to put on the Configure line for an old Centos 4.8 32bit install?

Thanks for any advice.

Well looks like it worked fine, just ended up in /usr/local/bin/find instead of overwriting the existing /usr/bin/find
because I forgot to add on the ./configure --prefix=/usr

glad that you found the problem. :)