Package database corruption... need assistance

[Scott I. Remick]

Hello. A friend of mine is running 5.1-REL and has somehow managed to get
some serious corruption on her package database. It's more than I've come
across before so I wanted to find out the easiest way to clean this up.

The way things stand now, she gets lots of stale dependency errors when
doing an pkgdb -F. Such as:

Stale dependency: AbiWord2-gnome-2.0.3 -> libIDL-0.8.2 (devel/libIDL):
libvorbis-1.0.1,3 (score:18%) ? ([y]es/[n]o/[a]ll) [no]

Which suggests that libIDL isn't installed... but according to ls
/var/db/pkg it actually is.

I had her try going into /usr/ports/devel/libIDL to do a "make clean
install" but we get this:

===>  Checking if devel/glib20 already installed
pkg_info: /var/db/pkg/XFree86-fontCyrillic-4.3.0/+CONTENTS: No such file or directory
*** Error code 1
 
Stop in /usr/ports/devel/glib20.
*** Error code 1
 
Stop in /usr/ports/devel/libIDL.

She has the folder /var/db/pkg/XFree86-fontCyrillic-4.3.0/ with some files
(+COMMENT,+DESC,+MTREE_DIRS,+REQUIRED_BY) but not +CONTENTS. Presumably a
lot of her other stale-dependency errors (and there are many from pkgdb
-F) are also corrupted /var/db/pkg folders.

What's the easiest way of fixing this? Do each of the problem programs
need to be "make deinstall" and "make clean reinstall"? That's a lot. :(