I've burned entirely too much time on this silly upgrade. I've rebuilt vast swaths of the machine to try to recover from various failures and I'm now to the point where trying to upgrade following the instructions is just telling me that I haven't followed the instructions.

Reading the various threads describing other people's experiences I'd have to say this process is just plain broken. It seems as though you need to have the gcc and glibc update themselves simultaneously and the upgrade is using a 32-bit version of gcc to bootstrap the glibc update... but that doesn't seem to work on my machine.

In the end, the reason I want the silly upgrade is to try to fix the KDE build failures, which apparently work fine on other AMD systems, and hopefully to get the binary version of Skype working... neither of those are critical enough to warrant this kind of investment in the project. One chap suggested a backup-and-re-install once 2005.1 (which apparently will also be a PITA upgrade) arrives.