GCC Update Zonked out System... need complete redo portage?

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Following the instructions in the Wiki, I updated my GCC to the latest (3.4), and made my way to updating my whole system.

I got a few emerge errors, which I "emerge --resume"d, being somewhat confused and under the influence of long days at work and little sleep.

I am now to the point where ALL emerges fail on some technical issue or another (latest one: Passepartout. ERROR: app-office/passepartout-0.5 failed. Function gnome2_src_compile, Line 48, Exitcode 2.) Frankly, I'll admit that I don't truely understand portage and ebuilds. And I'm just bootstrapping into Linux.

My system is slowly spiralling down to doom, one piece of software at a time. Attempts to "emerge --update --emptytree system" fail a few packages in, "emerge --resume"s and "emerge --resume --skipfirst"s are of no help.

I'm wondering if I need to just sweep my system clean of packages and start fresh. Again, knowing little about portage, I'm wondering how I can drain out portage and start fresh and clean. I can't imagine that all those packages (which have compiled A-OK in the past) all suddenly have horrible ebuild scripts, right?

Any hints, pointers, RTFMs with angry links, etc, would be appreciated. A few hours or two spent googling about and reading forum posts and browsing Wikis arn't turning up the results I need, so I'm casting about for a pointer or two. A friend of mine is telling me that I just need to dump Gentoo and use a binary package... but I'd really like to not do so. Gentoo's ironically the only Linux Distro I've sucessfully installed (hardest install my foot), I like the idea of all-from-source, etc, etc, propoganda here.

Thanks!

---- Stuff
emerge --info
Gentoo Base System version 1.6.13
Portage 2.0.53 (default-linux/x86/2005.1, gcc-3.4.4, glibc-2.3.5-r2, 2.6.14-gentoo-r2 i686)
=================================================================
System uname: 2.6.14-gentoo-r2 i686 AMD Athlon(tm) MP 2600+
distcc 2.18.3 i686-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632) [disabled]
dev-lang/python: 2.3.5, 2.4.2
sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.12
sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r6
sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r1
sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1
sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.20
virtual/os-headers: 2.6.11-r2
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86"
AUTOCLEAN="yes"
CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon-mp -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3.4/env /usr/kde/3.4/share/config /usr/kde/3.4/shutdown /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/lib/X11/xkb /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon-mp -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="autoconfig distlocks sandbox sfperms strict"
GENTOO_MIRRORS="ftp://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/pub/linux/gentoo ftp://gentoo.chem.wisc.edu/gentoo/ http://mirror.espri.arizona.edu/gentoo/"
MAKEOPTS="-j3"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="x86 X aalib aim alsa amd apache2 apm arts asm audiofile avi berkdb bitmap-fonts bonobo bzip2 ccache cdparanoia cdr crypt cups curl doc dvd dvdr eds emboss encode esd exif expat extraengine fam fat fbcon ffmpeg firefox flac font-server foomaticdb fortran gd gdbm gif glut glx gmp gnome gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 gtkhtml guile hpn idn imagemagick imlib innodb ipv6 java jpeg lcms libg++ libwww lua mad mhash mikmod mmx mng motif moznoirc moznomail mozsvg mp3 mpeg mysql mysqli ncurses nls nptl nsplugin ogg oggvorbis openal opengl oss pam pcre pdflib perl php png python quicktime readline sdl smp speex spell ssl svg tcpd tiff tokenizer truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev utf8 verbose vorbis win32codecs xine xml xml2 xmms xv xvid zlib userland_GNU kernel_linux elibc_glibc"
Unset: ASFLAGS, CTARGET, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS, PORTDIR_OVERLAY

/* Note: I've gone up and down through my USE flags many times, and I know I have reasons for each of them... however, I'd be less than honest if I said that I exactly remimber why they are all there. */

[feivelda]

It would be good if you can post the error messages, not only the last lines, also where the compiler/linker/whatever is killed