after upgrade to f12

[terry]

i upgrade on a dell b1110 that has f10 for awhile , then f11. using the 
upgrade to f12 cd from the fedora site. i had trouble with the screen 
last night but seems to have mysteriously disappered over night. one 
caveat left with  me was the need to update after rebooting. no such 
thing. nothing to update. using yum update gets this .....  libss.so.8 
cannot open shared object file, something about python 2.6.2 and gcc 
4.4.1.      rpm -i libssl.so.8 gets me ...opening failed.
a trip to duke edu says things about this problem not being an error 
with the lib but something to do with python.
their suggestion to type python and at the prompt type... import yum. 
then the error message is libssl.so.8.
trying yum, rpm and the gui for updates leaves me with the feeling i do 
not have a way to update.  Any suggestions?