Did a fresh install of todays (2008-03-18) rawhide, and was greeted with a firstboot traceback: ImportError:librpmdb-4.4.so: cannot open shared object file
firstboot doesn't do anything with rpm, so this seems like rpm was installed incorrectly. Reassigning to rpm first for some bright ideas.
Yeah, a closer look revealed that anaconda somehow managed to leave me with an install that didn't have rpm-libs on it. The rest of rpm was there...
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
I'd guess this was temporary anaconda breakage of the day. Closing as there's no evidence that rpm bug was involved, if this was a more common occurrance we'd probably heard more of it long time ago...