Doing a simple ‘yum update’ on a CenOS 5.2 guest server would go through the process of downloading all of the updates, but would only install libgcc and then quit suddenly without any mention of a problem.
With a little bit of experimenting, I came up with a process to get it to upgrade correctly. By updating some of the essential packages first, it somehow convinced the process to work:
# yum upgrade libgcc # yum update yum # yum update rpm # yum update