Running "yum update", yum appears to perform fine and appears to finish but continues to reside in memory:
... Updating : lftp 2/4 Cleanup : lftp 3/4 Cleanup : freetype 4/4
Updated: freetype.i386 0:2.2.1-25.el5_5 lftp.i386 0:3.7.11-4.el5_5.3
Complete! # ps -ef|grep yum root 1384 1336 0 06:21 pts/0 00:00:00 grep yum root 2229 1 0 Jul06 ? 00:00:11 /usr/bin/python -tt /usr/sbin/yum-updatesd ....
Running the above "ps -ef|grep yum" again after composing this email, process 2229 is still running (several minutes later). And this machine isn't particularly busy:
# vmstat procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu------ r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st 0 0 64 42268 73752 139556 0 0 0 2 8 4 1 0 99 0 0