serious upgrade problem

[Andrew]

Hello, since TSS seam pretty lazy on upgrades I decided to get my feet
wet and do it myself. I want gnome 2.8 badly. garnome, after 4+ days,
stopped at gwenview or something. This pissed me off quite nicely. So be
it. I downloaded all the gnome 2.8 related src.rpms off a fedora core 3
ftp site and started building my own using 'rpmbuild --rebuild'
Things were going great. I actually hit some dependencies like 
gnome-python2-2.6.0-3 who needed pygtk2-2.4.0 and pyorbit*. They were 
all available on the FTP site. I've build and installed them no problem.
I was quite excited at this point as this were going really well!
gnome-session-2.8.0-4, gnome-libs-1.4.1.2.90-44,
desktop-file-utils-2.8.0-, gnome-utils-2.8.0-5, gnome-desktop-2.8.0-3,
pygtk2-2.4.0-1, pyorbit, gnome-python2-2.6.0-3,
gnome-terminal-2.7.3-1... All these no problem. It recall thinking it
was too good to be true. It was too easy! I was dead right:
gnome-panel-2.8.1-3 required libsoup who required evolution-data-server
who required evolution who required libgal2 who required gtkhtml3 who
required gnome-icon-theme who required libgnomeprint22 and
libgnomeprintui who asked for pango who asked for xorg-x11 >6.8.0 Sadly,
xorg-x11-6.8.1 would build because it asked for
/usr/lib/rpm/redhat/brp-compress but my system have
/usr/lib/rpm/yellowdog/brp-compress. I made a symlink: 'ln -s
/usr/lib/rpm/yellowdog /usr/lib/rpm/redhat' and build succeed.
 rpm -Uvh xorg-x11 failed with:
xorg-x11 < 6.8.0 conflicts with xorg-x11-devel-6.8.1-12
well.. this one depend on like 15 other packages.

 I've pushed my luck as far as erasing the conflicting packages or
--force upgrades. I eventually lost track of my changes.... Now my
system is fairly broken. I don't know how I to fix it up. I dont know
how finding out what is broken. I dont know... But yes, its all my
fault. I want gnome 2.8 badly. I still want it. If I have to re-install
everything again I think I will go nut. I worked a lot on my actual
installation to get it running fast and smooth as it is.

 I was about to buy YDL4 off TSS stores but now I know there is no point
giving them my money if I'd still had to go on my own with upgrades and
such... and crash myself into dependence hell by the way. Please guys
and gals, dont tell me to install another distro I tried them all.
Debian? its alien technology. Ubuntu? not enough goodies and It actually
wrecked havoc on my disks (it ate all top 5 partitions on both drives.
Big problem getting them to work again) None is working like I expect a
OS to work except yellowdog but it come with RPM hell and lack of
support from its producers.

Suggestion on how to get my installation on its feet again (with gnome
2.8 and xorg 2.6.8)?