SPARCstation 5 Online Update Hangs

Hello all,

I have a SS5 running SuSE sparc 7.3, on the 2.2.20 kernel.  It is a totally vanilla install from the cd's.  Some of the recent sendmail vulnerabilities etc have encouraged me to get a regular update working for this system.

I fired up yast2, and went to the online update, picked the ftp.gwdg.de site and all seemed to be going well.  The first thing it made me do was update yast2-core-pkginfo, it was successful in downloading / installing this.

Then I went back into yast2 and connected again to get the rest of the package.  After the package update descriptions are downloaded the session disconnects from the ftp server, and then the system hangs.  CPU goes to 100%, with one process "y2bignfat" taking about 99%.  No other processes spawned from this session are running, and the system seems to stay in this state indefinitely.

I searched the archives on this list and followed the instructions regarding updating the /var/lib/YaST/update.inf, and the /var/adm/current_package_descr/ area.  I tried the update again, and got the same issue.

I also get 1000's of these lines in the /var/log/y2log file:
[yast2-core-pkginfo] RawPackageInfo.cc(getProvides):485 common.pkd already closed

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Ryan