This week I needed to install OpenSSL 0.9.8g on one of my servers. When I went to configure and build the libraries with the Sun C compiler, I noticed that 64-bit libraries were produced by default. It turns out that this is the default behavior if you try to build OpenSSL on a 64-bit platform. To build 32-bit shared libraries, I ran Configure with the "shared" and "solaris-x86-cc" options:
$ cd openssl-0.9.8g
$ ./Configure shared --prefix=/usr/local solaris-x86-cc
$ make
$ make install
There may be other ways to do this, but this method appears to work ok.