[CentOS] Back-leveling error?

This is all related to my struggles with Asterfax and libtiff.

I rpm -U to libtiff 3.8.2  and I am still having troubles.  So I decided 
to go back to libtiff 3.6.1 (oh and libtiff-devel that seems to be a 
prerec).

So after a bit of playing that did not seem to do anything, I figured 
out to:

rpm -U --oldprogram libtiff-3.6.1-8.i386.rpm libtiff-devel-3.6.1-8.i386.rpm

and this seemed to work:

rpm -q libtiff
libtiff-3.6.1-8


But now things seem to be even more 'broken' if possible.

Did I do the backleveling the right way?

How do I check?