synaptic hanging... doh

[Alex Hunsley <lard tardis ed ac uk>]

I've installed apt and synaptic on RH9. Apt itself seems to work, but if 
I run synaptic and install something like that, there's a 50% chance 
that when the "installing packages" dialog appear (once rpms are 
downloaded) the thing just hangs there and never exits. After that, I 
can't even use apt on the command line - it just hangs as well - I have 
to reboot the machine to get apt to work again.

Anyone know of a way to fix this situation - or should I just give up on 
synaptic?

I've heard that if the rpm database gets fouled, you do:

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.*
rpm --rebuilddb

.. but this just appears to hang when I do the second command....
doh.

alex