The attachment to this bug has a trace of an uncaught script exception -- coing for 7.0 CD's rpm to rpm-4.0.2 update recently issued.
Created attachment 14243 [details] rpm -Uvvvh rpm-4.0.2-whatever trace and stat and file of two files
Yup, %pre in the rpm package fails if both Packages (db3) and packages.rpm (db1) files exist in /var/lib/rpm. This is a feature, not a bug, since both files should not exist simultaneously, that's an error requiring manual intervention.
*** Bug 34792 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***