James B. Byrne wrote:

yum upgrade -y yada yada yada ....

then lots of errors like:

/usr/share/gnome/help/gdm/fr/gdm.xml:173: parser error : Entity 'eacute' not defined

and so on until

Document is not well-formed XML: /usr/share/gnome/help/gdm/it/gdm.xml

Updating : amtu ##################### [173/520] Updating : grub ##################### [174/520] ...

Is this expected, acceptable, or a bomb waiting to go off later?

sounds like a local issue on your machine.. Could you perhaps run with yum -d8 and paste the stuff into http://pastebin.centos.org/ ( mark the expiry for a month or something ) and post that url in here.

- KB