I read the Bugzillas but I didn't see anything about progress stalling with the maintainer of rpmlib... is there more to the story?
My original mail about not booting didn't have anything to do with rpms. It turned out to be a problem with a Windows XP RAID on other disks on the same machine. I didn't want to mount them, I didn't tell anaconda to do anything with them when installing, but it insisted on setting up all kinds of dmraid nonsense in the initrd to try and access them anyway, then a raid bug came along and made everything hang during initrd processing. I eventually got it to work by customizing the initrd scripts to stop trying to setup the raid I didn't want to see anyway :-).