perl upgrade broke 5.3 system

[dave]

Hello,
    I just updated ports after being away for two weeks. The update process
itself went fine, my problem came when i ran the command to update
perl-dependent ports as suggested in /usr/ports/UPDATING. I got a bunch of
failed updates, php4-extensions, and any of my p5* ports, apache2,
subversion, ices, etc. I've tried manually running portupgrade packagename
but all i get is a prompt, it's as if portupgrade thinks everything is
updated, but dependent perl ports are not working. The noticer was when
MailScanner couldn't find SpamAssassin although the latest version of both
ports are installed.
    On another question when i install a port if it installs dependencies
and those are only needed by that port, when i uninstall the port i'd like
to updte and remove those dependencies as well, is this doable?
    Some urgency!
Thanks.
Dave.