Don’t ever kill rpm/yum, while it’s running, especially when it’s doing that rpmdb transaction. rpm won’t release the lock and leaves some temporary files probably related to the transaction. How dumb? How difficult is it to write a signal handler, that cleans up the crap? I ran into this problem quite often. I start rpm or yum and do an update or something, and then it freezes forever. After losing my patience, I kill it, and I can’t use the rpm tools anymore. The fix: simple, use brute-force

rm -rf /var/lib/rpm/__db*
rpm --rebuilddb
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