Problems with ports lately?

[Guillermo Sobalvarro]

Hello.  I've been using FreeBSD for a number of years
now on i386 and recently am having plenty of problems
building ports.  Either they don't build and complain
this or that is missing, or ask taht I download and
install x or y port first (sometimes this is already
there and never happend in the past), etc.  

I've deleted and FTP'd the whole ports distribution,
to no avail on 4.9, 4.10 and on 5.3.  There is always
some port that screws everything up for me.  On 5.3 I
upgraded the whole ports tree with CVS, did a portsdb
-uU, then a portupgrade -arR and finally a pkgdb -F
(just in case).  Here is my 5.3 cvs-supfile:

*default host=cvsup2.freebsd.org
*default base=/usr/local/etc/cvsup
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_3  delete
use-rel-suffix compress
src-all tag=.

Has anyone had this happen lately or am I just doing
everything wrong?  Appreciate any help with steps in
ugrading the ports with the correct ones if mine are
wrong.  I used those recommended by the folks at
O'Reilly LAMP.

Thanks.

Guillermo