[CentOS] Can someone help with SpamBayes problem?

I've posted to the SpamBayes users list, but there seems to be no traffic
there, so I've had no replies.

If there is anyone here using SpamBayes, I'd appreciate some advice or
at least suggestions....

I'm running Centos 5.8 here.

Day before yesterday I decided to look and see if there was a newer
SpamBayes than I was then using. lo and behold, there was. I was using
1.1a4, and there was a 1.1a6.

so I downloaded and installed it. bad move.

having done that, I now have no spam filtering at all. I run my own
sendmail mail server here, and it uses procmail to deliver. Procmail
invokes one of the SpamBayes tools for every email, and it adds a
X-SpamBayes header with its determination of spamminess. except that 
now it doesn't.

the nightly retrain event (a cron job) also fails, with complaints
about invalid syntax in:

   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/lockfile-0.9.1-py2.4.egg/lockfile/linklockfile.py", line 6
       from . import (LockBase, LockFailed, NotLocked, NotMyLock, LockTimeout,
            ^
   SyntaxError: invalid syntax

a little snooping around at python.org shows that the "from . import" 
syntax was added in python 2.5. However, on Centos 5.8 we still have
Python 2.4.3. (never mind that the docs on SpamBayes claim it will run
on Python 2.2, they're plainly wrong).

So, I tried to reinstall SpamBayes 1.1a4 over top of what I had. It
appeared to install (to the extent that the info displayed when the 
installer runs means anything), but it doesn't work either. no spam
filtering, no nightly cron job.

I'm guessing I'll have to figure out, in detail, which files were installed
by the 1.1a6 installation and go remove each individual one then try
reinstalling 1.1a4.

Unless someone can suggest a better path to try.

I'd appreciate any suggestions any of you may wish to make.

thanks in advance!

Fred

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