[TriLUG] Cannot remove packages from RHEL 4... package hell is warm this time of year

[Byarlay, Wayne A.]

Hey all,

I built this RHEL 4 VM, and well, I need to slim it down by removing
many packages. The problem is that when I try to remove the packages,
(right now going through gnome's gui, but I don't necessarily need to do
it this way), I'm told that I cannot remove them because... they don't
exist. But if I try to run "up2date" to get them, I'm told (Surprise!)
That they are already on the latest version! This is true for nearly
everything I try to get rid of.

How do I get out of this ridiculous situation? I've already tried
deleting the __db* files and rebuilding the rpm database, that did not
seem to help...

wab