Installation Issues

[Guest]

I was running a perfectly stable Gentoo system running KDE3. I got rid of my cable modem access, and after hearing KDE3.0.1 was released, I brought my computer over to my friend's house and tried to update it. After an emerge rsync, I typed emerge -p kde and it showed all the kde3.0.1 packages. I ran emerge kde, but it would run through acting like it was installing, but did nothing. Trying to unmerge (Losing the kde files I had) and trying to merge again left me with the same darn problem.

Then I figured I might as well reinstall so I spent several hours reformatting, starting from a nice stage1 install, etc, etc. Got it up to par, run emerge rsync, then ran emerge kde and the same problem remained. I could merge a few things like lynx, but other programs would say "Unpacking source... Installing... merged..." (spanned over several lines) but never even installed a bloody thing! WHAT HAPPENED TO GENTOO?! I miss my Linux box now, since it's a dormant P4 1.6 GHz waiting to be used, but Gentoo can't merge anything anymore, and it's frustrating. And yes, I tried emerge portage. Whenever I try to emerge anything, I'm left with nil, back with my perfectly working installation, and my new installation. HELP! (I don't want to resort going back to Red Hat or Mandrake, both of which I don't like after using Gentoo.)