Yum is going berserk!

[Joe Zeff]

This morning, I was doing a system update using yumex while I was 
cooking breakfast.  When I got back, the system was hung so badly that I 
had to use the reset button.  The system came back up fine, so I opened 
a terminal and tried this:

su -c yum-complete-transaction

After thinking things over, it found the transaction and told me that 
there were 39 incomplete items that it would take care of.  I kept an 
eye on the terminal to see what was going on, and it's a good thing, 
because suddenly it began spewing all sorts of packages that it was 
going to erase.  I used ^C to kill it because I didn't want my system 
hosed.  Before doing anything else, including another yumex update, I 
want to see if anybody has any ideas about what happened or how to 
prevent it from happening again.

BTW, this is the second time in less than a month that I've had a system 
update hang on this box.  The last time it munged a kernel update badly 
enough to cause a kernel panic on reboot.  I ended up booting into the 
previous kernel, followed by removing and installing the bad kernel to 
get grub.cfg fixed.  Considering that preupgrade also hung, leaving my 
computer almost unusable, and that I never had the slightest trouble 
with earlier versions of Fedora, you can see why I say I "upgraded" to 
F16.  I'm not at all favorably impressed by it and will be moving to F17 
as soon as the inevitable teething troubles are ironed out.

(I've also posted the above via copy/paste to the fedoraforum to get 
this question seen by as many people as possible.)