rpm Segfault

[Scott Talbot]

Well something has really screwed up this time!

On Friday last, I set about to update my box, I installed the 30 some
programs, up2date failed near the end of the process.  After up2date did
it's cleanup, 1 file was left xorg-x11-xdm.  I believe the failure was
reported as a segfault, but possibly I am misremembering as I recall
seeing something about a bad/mangled header.  Further attempts to
install this file always resulted in a segfault, but when I did a rpm -
qa | grep xorg, I found that rpm reported that the file was installed.

Ok. the xorg file is irrelevant to my problem in that any attempt to
install any file results in a segfault.  I ran strace on it and found
that the command exited at:

open("/etc/rpm/macros", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No such file
or directory)
open("/etc/rpm/i386-linux/macros", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No
such file or directory)
stat64("/root/.rpmmacros", 0xfef150d0)  = -1 ENOENT (No such file or
directory)
time(NULL)                              = 1093270943
open("/proc/filesystems", O_RDONLY)     = 3
read(3, "nodev\tsysfs\nnodev\trootfs\nnodev\tb"..., 4095) = 267
close(3)                                = 0
--- SIGSEGV (Segmentation fault) @ 0 (0) ---
+++ killed by SIGSEGV +++

only 1 other error is reported, just about the first open returns
ENOENT:
open("/etc/ld.so.preload", O_RDONLY)    = -1 ENOENT (No such file or
directory)

but then the rpm continues until the above lines.


What I've tried:

booted into FC2 and forced a re-install of rpm-4.10 
   No errors - No help either

tested an rpm of rpm-4.02
	So many dependencies!

Listed contents of rpm and found that it provided a file macros,  at
usr/lib/rpm and provided a link to that file in /etc
   that may have worked but I found another missing file with the same
name (macros) later on - removed link (how many different files named
macros can rpm use?)

What's left:

try yum update from FC2 using --root options
	may or may not fix the problem as there were no other files to download
for rpm after the error initially occurred

Delete and re-install from CD - perform up2dates the rest of the week.
	Yeah, but I HATE to give up!

can anyone make another suggestion?

Scott