Apparently it is considered very bad form to use -U with emerge, as apparently -U can wind up upgrading things but then not downgrading dependencies that will cause conflicts. Of course, nothing I can find says how to fix the problem once it happens. I haven't done a full-world rebuild because I'm hoping that re-emerging just the gpgme and bash dependencies will take care of it. Will see in a half hour or so (as mentioned, it's going very slowly due to the hung bash shells sucking up the processor cycles).

In other news, work on Cinemon moves forward while the computer tries to fix itself. Have got everything working on Linux, and have begun working on integrating the various components I created on my own time (mostly data importers). Lack of a prompt is making it very frustrating, as is the lack of a PythonWin-like Python prompt with easy-to-use history features and integrated calltips. May install IPython to see if it provides something similar.