System frelled up and portage doesn't work

[parasonic]

I hadn't done an emerge -Du world in a few months, so I went to do it a few days ago. When I did, Python DIED, miserably. I am at work right now and don't remember the error, but it seemed that the best course of action would be to boot off a LiveCD and try to get it in that way. Well, I tried doing this by installing a Stage 3 tarball (was this the right thing to do?), as I don't mind re-emerging a bunch of stuff anyway, and both 2005.1-r1 and 2006.0 failed. They both failed "from previous errors" at the extraction of /bin/users or something of the like. I chrooted, and Python did the same thing. I don't know what to do to get this thing up and running...ideas?

I'd really like to get this back up and running as soon as possible...it's my machine that has typical 80+ days of uptime. I'm on a windows box now, so please HELP. Thanks--

[Maedhros]

We really can't do much without the actual error messages, but here are a few things that I think might have gone wrong:

• Error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5
  
• Error while loading shared libraries: libexpat.so.0

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No-one's more important than the earthworm.

[parasonic]

What I was hoping is that there would just be a way to "reinstall" Python and go around troubleshooting it. Thanks for the help..