Are there any risks in installing i386 binaries (via rpm) on a x86_64 installation of CentOS 4.4?
Personally I find that the best solution is to install an i386, then swapout the kernel, install a few extra 64 bit libraries, and then potentially reinstall whatever packages you need to be 64bit for performance reasons.
[Mind you, you might need to mess around a bit to get this working, I can't remember the exact steps I took last time I did this to get the rpms to install without complaints, but I think I remember actually doing both a i386 and x86_64 install in seperate partitions and then doing a manual merge and removing one of them... should probably document it...]
Me? I use 32-bit everything, except kernel, libc, stdlibc++ and the compiler. But then all I need it for is development of short but extremely memory hogging C/C++ applications.
Maciej