Could you give some examples of the packages installed by an upgrade that you
thought were not necessary?

Sorry I lost that list - _but_ and update should just not install _any_
packets. Unless they are already installed in an old version or required
by an dependency. My disk space runs tight and I cannot upgrade anymore
because every upgrade installs a bunch of things I just remove later...

hmmm ... there are a "base" set of packages that are always installed by an
upgrade ... if you are seeing packages other than these "base" packages, please
list them and we'll look at them individually, however, in general upgrades will
always ensure a "base" set of packages are installed ...

Some packages which make up the "base" for the i386 in 7 include:

MAKEDEV, SysVinit, anacron, apmd, ash, at, authconfig,
basesystem, bash, bc, bdflush, bzip2, chkconfig, console-tools,
cpio, cracklib, cracklib-dicts, crontabs, cyrus-sasl, openssl, perl,
db1, db2, db3, dev, dhcpcd, diffutils, e2fsprogs,
ed, eject, file, filesystem, fileutils, findutils, gawk,
gdbm, glib, glibc, gmp, gnupg, gpm, grep,
groff, gzip, hdparm, isapnptools, lilo, info, initscripts,
kbdconfig, kernel, kernel-pcmcia-cs, kernel-utils, krb5-libs, kudzu, less,
libstdc++, libtermcap, linuxconf, logrotate, losetup, mailcap, mailx,
man, mingetty, mkbootdisk, mkinitrd, mktemp, modutils, mount,
mouseconfig, ncompress, ncurses, net-tools, newt, ntsysv, openldap,
pam, passwd, pciutils, popt , procmail, procps, psmisc,
pump, pwdb, quota, raidtools, readline, redhat-logos, redhat-release,
rootfiles, rpm, sash, sed, sendmail, setserial, setup,
setuptool, sh-utils, shadow-utils, slang, slocate, stat, sysklogd,
tar, termcap, textutils, time, timeconfig, tmpwatch, utempter,
util-linux, vim-common, vim-minimal, vixie-cron, which, words, zlib