F9 EeePC packagekit problem

[Beartooth]

	I have my little 7" EeePC running on house current. Yesterday 
evening I ran gnome-packagekit (from the launcher, which I keep on a 
panel), trying to find things I can remove. Having picked a few and hit 
Apply, I left it installing things. 

	This morning, ten or eleven hours later, it showed itself stil 
installing something; and there was motion indicating as much -- the 
monitor wasn't simply frozen. The thing it claimed to be installing (with 
the bar graph a little past half) had some long complex name beginning 
with x -- I think xaw. I let it go another hour or two; nothing seemed to 
happen.

	I forced it to quit. From a root tab on gnome-terminal, I told it 
"yum clean all," which I have always found very fast. This time, instead, 
it reported "Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit," and put the cursor on 
the next line, without a prompt -- and there it sits.

	I want to run yum update before tackling the fight with 
packagekit again. (My display of that is atrocious; see the thread I 
started yesterday called "F9 EeePC add/remove trouble")

	Should I just abort the cleanup with Ctrl-C, and proceed directly 
to yum update? Would it be useful to try rpm --rebuilddb first??

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Fedora 7, 8 & 9; Alpine 1.10, Pan 0.132; Privoxy 3.0.6;
Dillo 0.8.6, Galeon 2, Epiphany 2, Opera 9, Firefox 2 & 3
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.