yum/rpm hosed me yesterday

[Chuck Campbell <campbell accelinc com>]

I installed yum on my rh9 box, and it looked like it was working.

At least yum check-updates showed a lot of packages for me to update.

I saw that rpm was on the list, so I did yum update rpm*

It went through all of its steps without errors, and I thought "this is
the best thing since sliced bread"

I did rpm -qa | grep rpm to verify the current version and I get this:
rpmdb: unable to join the environment
error: db4 error(11) from dbenv->open: Resource temporarily unavailable
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Resource temporarily unavailable (11)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm


Now it appears I'm stuffed.  What do I do next?

-chuck