Okay this has been a huge annoyance since I installed Fedora Core 4... - It seems like Synaptic and other package managers recognize everything fine. - Half the time when trying to compile a program for use it believes things like GLib, Gcc are not installed. - It thinks libstdc++-devel is installed when it clearly isn't or vice versa. It seems by installing it I actually cause the OS to think its not installed. Well I could list crap forever... To sum it: My entire FC4 OS is lost, it has no idea if anything is properly installed. An app will think it is not installed, synaptic will clearly say it is or vice versa. An rpm will ask for dependecies, I'll install them and it will keep asking for them... Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Any tips short of re-format the OS?

Whenever you encounter a problem with dependencies you should understand and fix it immediately, or you will quickly end up in dependency hell. It seems your situation is pretty complicated but I don't think it's impossible to fix. 3rd party RPMs not built for your specific distro are a likely cause. One thing to try is to uninstall some of the affected packages until your package manager is satisfied and then reinstall them one by one. Of course it the RPM database is somehow corrupted then a reinstall is your only option.

Yah I'm getting issue's everywhere...
It is asking for lib-gcj-* and it is obviously installed including the devel and the source... I try installing the fedora core rpm for it and it says "newer version exists" but then I try and install some other rpms right off the fedora site it says it cannot find it and thus won't install...

I'm thinking about re-formatting my root partition and reinstalling.
I guess its probably good I do that anyway, this is the longest and nearly first ever linux partition i've had go without a reformat. So being new to linux when i first installed this I've kinda made a mess :)