Hello again.  I managed to get Mandrake 8.1 up and running again, and I 
even upgraded to KDE 3 without much hassle.  Today I tried to update 
gnumeric and got into such a nest of dependencies that I had to give it 
up!  The "Software Installer" (variously called rpminst and rpmdrake) in 
Mandrake 8.1 seems to do nothing about resolving dependencies.

I've heard that there's a better utility for updating RPMs under Red Hat, 
that automatically downloads all necessary files... is something like that 
available for Mandrake as well?  Thanks in advance.  --Ben