i think i may have figured something out.
i had some major hard disk probs a few days ago but just to get my computer going i installed an old 3gig hard disk and installed mandrake on it. The first thing i did was install apt for rpm for mandrake (:P) per calum/voidmains tip.
I noticed that a tonne of packages have changed from the base Mandrake install from being packagenamewhateverX.Xmdk to being packagenamewhateverX.Xtex
im sure other users have noticed this. What im guessing is that all these programs have been upgraded to this *tex thing and when you try to install a package it need to uninstall alot of this stuff that is in *mdk style to be *tex style. For exapmle i went into synaptic and double clicked on "msfonts" in the uninstall. it had to depend on a new version of some Xfont thing which had been changed to *tex style which in turn need a whole bunch of stuff that needed this *tex style to work properly.
Another example (a short one) for me to upgrade the GAIM instant messenger (which had changed from *mdk to *tex) was a download of something like 44mb. thats alot for an instant messenger
Anyway i hope some one figures this shoit out cos i may be using mandrake for a while.