problem upgrading distro via yum

I am experiencing a problem in trying to upgrade a machine from fc8 to
fc9 via yum. What I am seeing is a lot of this:

Error: Missing Dependency: libldap-2.3.so.0 is needed by package
gnupg2-2.0.9-2.fc8.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libldap-2.3.so.0 is needed by package
httpd-2.2.9-1.fc8.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: libssl.so.6 is needed by package
httpd-tools-2.2.9-1.fc8.i386 (installed)

It isn't seeing "httpd-tools-2.2.9-1.fc9.i386.rpm" as a needed
upgrade. I can verify with "yum list" queries that it knows the fc9
version is available to it. Is there anyway to tell yum that a package
tagged for fc9 is newer than one tagged fc8? This machine has made the
journey from 7 to 8 just fine and I would rather continue this path
rather than have to physically take the machine offline for doing the
upgrade from dvd. The machine isn't in an easy to get to position.

I have manually ran "rpm -Uvh <file>" for quite a few packages,
including yum itself, but I don't want to have to do it for all of
them (assuming I don't run into some dependency problem in the
process)

So to restate the question, can yum be forced into thinking that an
fc9 version of a package is indeed an update to an fc8 version of a
package if the version numbers are the same?  I have checked the man
pages and tried several searches of both the web and just the yum
mailing list archive, and I don't see a solution, but admittedly I
might have overlooked it in all the results.  I did discover another
person having the same problem I am, but there was no resolution
posted for him at the forum he posted to.