Portage looks for db at: www.sleepycat.com/update/3.2.9/db-3.2.9.tar.gz It is really at www.sleepycat.com/update/snapshot/db-3.2.9.tar.gz I had to manually edit it's entry in the portage/sys-libs/db/ directory to get my emerge system to find it.
*** Bug 9492 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
thanks :)