So, I've loved package management, for the most part. It makes installation of software much easier than installing everything from source. I started using Linux full time in 2001, and since then I've had my share of situations where the tangled web of dependencies caused me hours of configuration wrangling.
Every once in a while, though, the system fails. Now, generally, I use either yum via the command line or yumex. I haven't been a big fan of PackageKit, because it obfuscates what packages are being installed, so I'm not even aware of what is going on on my own system. At least with yum/yumex, I review the list of packages, and if something goes wrong later, a light bulb usually goes of in my head saying "Aha, we just updated that."
Anyway, I've been having the darnedest problems with the Adobe Flash plugin on my machine at work. It's as if anything Flash wasn't being updated properly. Scrolling, minimizing, et al generally cause the flash app to go default gray, and I have to activate elements to get it to update. YouTube videos are particularly troublesome (especially the embedded ones)...the details that show up when you minimize the vid to get embedding tags tend to flicker over while the video is playing.
I'd tried reinstalling Firefox, flash-plugin, and I'd even blown away my .mozilla directory. After doing some library checking, I found a mismatch in gtk2. My work machine was way behind my server. Turns out, some update of yum had installed new repos, but it merely installed them as foo.rpmnew (as rpms are wont to do). I believe I ran into this before. Neither yum nor yumex tell you when that happens anymore, so if something goes and does it, you'd better be watching.
For the past 4 months, I'd been not properly getting fedora-updates. I rejiggered the repo files, and bang, 700MB of updates.
Whee.