CentOS 5.6 - some glitches.

1.Yesterday I booted up CentOS 5.6 (32 bit) after not having used it for 2 weeks. First thing that was troublesome is that I was unable to get the CentOS base updates due to
'metadata file does not match checksum'.
Now this problem is well known to me and in the past I could always fix it by running

yum clean all
yum makecache
yum update

This time I tried the above plus yum clean metadata on its own plus yum update --disableplugin=fastestmirror plus one or two other commands including uncommenting the baseurl line in the CentOS-Base.repo for released updates. Nothing worked.

Lastly I tried yum makecache --disableplugin=fastestmirror and Bingo, no more 'metadata file does not match checksum' errors.

2. Much more seroius. After a while I noticed my panels were frozen and then turned blank.
This is a known bug which seems to affect 32bit versions and was introduced after the latest glibc update. http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=4817
Someone released a temporary fix but

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2011-April/110474.html

Let's hope for an early fix. This morning btw. I booted up and the panels were back.