numerous errors trying to update with yum

[Robert P. J. Day]

  is anyone else having download/update problems with yum? i've had
nothing but grief trying to do something as simple as "yum list updates".

  on one occasion, i did get the list of updates.  on other occasions, the
operation will fail with a "retrygrab" error. just now, the same operation
gave me:

Damaged or Bad header.info from Fedora Core 1.90 - Development Tree
This is probably because of a downed server or an invalid header.info on a 
repository.

(this strikes me as an unnecessarily vague error.  either the header.info
is bad/damaged, or the server is down.  surely yum can tell the 
difference, no?)

other times, the operation just flat out hangs.  is all of this possibly
due to just an overloaded server?

rday

p.s.  i just did "yum list updates" again, and it smoked through a list
of rpms nicely.  go figure.