I'm not sure if this is smart in all situations, but if you have a borked version of MySQL (5.0 in my case), and want to install a higher version of it, you can use these commands in Linux (RHEL in my case) to force installation on the server- and client- RPM files, assuming those files are in the current directory:

rpm -ivh MySQL-* --aid --force --nodeps --replacefiles

Aaron Longnion
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