HELP!!! KMail held hostage by Akonadiserver

Ever since I installed some updates yesterday, Akonadiserver fails to  
start properly and  hangs KMail. when Akonadiserver eventually  
crashes, it takes KMail with it. This is *extremely* frustrating and  
making me want to switch to Thunderbird or something less broken.  
OTOH, I have years of old messages stuck in KMail and I'd hate to lose  
all those messages!

Can someone please help me with this? I've been using Linux and  
Fedora/RedHat for years and can't recall having this much trouble with  
a "critical" (to me) app!

I tried starting Akonadiserver manually from Konsole, but "akonadictl  
start" just gets me this:
[akonadiserver] "[
[akonadiserver] 0: akonadiserver(_Z11akBacktracev+0x39) [0x40ac09]
[akonadiserver] 1: akonadiserver [0x40b152]
[akonadiserver] 2: /lib64/libc.so.6 [0x31c04332f0]
[akonadiserver] 3: /lib64/libc.so.6(gsignal+0x35) [0x31c0433275]
[akonadiserver] 4: /lib64/libc.so.6(abort+0x175) [0x31c0434a55]
[akonadiserver] 5:  
/usr/lib64/libQtCore.so.4(_Z17qt_message_output9QtMsgTypePKc+0x74)  
[0x3fb4a6b7e4]
[akonadiserver] 6:  
akonadiserver(_ZN15FileDebugStream9writeDataEPKcx+0xa8) [0x40c278]
[akonadiserver] 7:  
/usr/lib64/libQtCore.so.4(_ZN9QIODevice5writeEPKcx+0x78) [0x3fb4af9c68]
[akonadiserver] 8: /usr/lib64/libQtCore.so.4 [0x3fb4b0b729]
[akonadiserver] 9:  
/usr/lib64/libQtCore.so.4(_ZN11QTextStreamD1Ev+0x39) [0x3fb4b0c919]
[akonadiserver] 10: akonadiserver(_ZN6QDebugD1Ev+0x4e) [0x4068fe]
[akonadiserver] 11:  
/usr/lib64/libakonadiprivate.so.1(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer25startMysqlDatabaseProcessEv+0x182b)  
[0x3fb5c5946b]
[akonadiserver] 12:  
/usr/lib64/libakonadiprivate.so.1(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer20startDatabaseProcessEv+0x2e0)  
[0x3fb5c5dfd0]
[akonadiserver] 13:  
/usr/lib64/libakonadiprivate.so.1(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServerC1EP7QObject+0x76)  
[0x3fb5c5e276]
[akonadiserver] 14:  
/usr/lib64/libakonadiprivate.so.1(_ZN7Akonadi13AkonadiServer8instanceEv+0x4a)  
[0x3fb5c5f57a]
[akonadiserver] 15: akonadiserver(main+0x3b8) [0x405f28]
[akonadiserver] 16: /lib64/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xfd) [0x31c041ea4d]
[akonadiserver] 17: akonadiserver [0x405a79]
[akonadiserver] ]
[akonadiserver] "
ProcessControl: Application 'akonadiserver' returned with exit code  
255 (Unknown error)
[akonadiserver] search paths:  ("/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin",  
"/usr/kerberos/sbin", "/usr/kerberos/bin", "/usr/lib64/ccache",  
"/usr/local/bin", "/usr/bin", "/bin", "/usr/local/sbin", "/usr/sbin",  
"/sbin", "/home/john/bin", "/usr/sbin", "/usr/local/sbin",  
"/usr/local/libexec", "/usr/libexec", "/opt/mysql/libexec",  
"/opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin")
[akonadiserver] Database process exited unexpectedly during initial  
connection!
[akonadiserver] executable: "/usr/libexec/mysqld"
[akonadiserver] arguments:  
("--defaults-file=/home/john/.local/share/akonadi//mysql.conf",  
"--datadir=/home/john/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/",  
"--socket=/home/john/.local/share/akonadi/db_misc/mysql.socket")
[akonadiserver] stdout: ""
[akonadiserver] stderr: ""
[akonadiserver] exit code: 1
[akonadiserver] process error: "Unknown error"
[akonadiserver] "[

I'm no programmer, so I haven't a clue what is going on. All I know is  
I installed a butt-load of updates yesterday and then KMail wouldn't  
let me POP one of my email addresses, so I tried restarting it and  
then started having problems with Akonadi. :-(
Maybe I shouldn't have had KMail open when I was doing the updates,  
but it seems to me that's a system problem if it let the updates go  
forward if it needed everything shut down. I even rebooted the system  
last night thinking that might be the problem, but it still won't  
start Akonadiserver.