Seriously messed up system - is there anyway back?

[Paul F. Johnson]

Hi,

For some reason I am unable figure out, my main box has gone insane and 
decided not to bother installing correctly a whole raft of packages from a yum
update (despite yum reporting the had been installed correctly).

An example is that I'm having to use kde instead of gnome as gnome complains
thus

There was an error starting the GNOME settings daemon. Some things, such as
themes, sounds, or background settings may not work correctly. The Settings
daemon restarted too many times. The last error message was: Child process did
not give an error message, unknown failure occured. GNOME will try to restart
the Settings Daemon next time you log in.

If I do rpm -q gnome-desktop, I'm told it's not installed. Parts of evolution
didn't install as well as a pile of others - firefox is just saying permission
denied for me (as me) and me as su.

I've cleaned the metafiles from yum and rebuilt the rpmdb, but all I have is a
partially usable system.

Does anyone know of a way to rescue my machine? I don't really want to a
reinstall if I can help it.

TTFN

Paul

-- 
"Logic, my dear Zoe, is merely the ability to be wrong with authority" - Dr
Who