Re: emerge problems and weirdness

I am having a problem with Emerge. 

Last night I built gnome2 - emerge gnome

All went well or so it seems, I tried to switch the desktop font size
and the gnome-font-properties dialog is missing the text entry and the
size buttons. I figured something went wrong with emerge / gnome compile
so I tried to emerge gnome again. 

This only produces some verb-age about nothing to update and installing
gnome to the system. 

After seeking help on this list, I was told to try and rm -rf
/var/tmp/portage/*  and rerun emerge gnome again. The  thinking being
that I still have the work directory so emerge gets confused and just
installs whats been compiled.

I run emerge gnome and all it does is recreate its
/var/tmp/portage/gnome directory. 

Now if I want I can emerge -ep gnome | grep ( component ) and reemerge
that way, this does work, but a simple emerge gnome does not. 

Now I have gotten emails from other readers who suggest emerge --update
world I can not run that command as it crashes the kernel, 

Is my only option to go threw by hand and reemerge these? Has anyone had
t his problem? 

Gentoo 1.2 
gcc  2.95.3
AMD 1.2
1 Gig ram
VIA kt133 MB

Thanks for your help. 

Vito.