After emerging popt-1.10.4, essentially everything "gnome" was broken. revdep-rebuild showed that libpopt was missing. Used slocate and discover that the libraries had been installed to /usr/lib6464 rather than /usr/lib64. copying the libraries over to /usr/lib64 works (sym links don't break, etc) ~ $ slocate libpopt /usr/lib6464/libpopt.a /usr/lib6464/libpopt.la /usr/lib6464/libpopt.so.0.0.0 /usr/lib6464/libpopt.so /usr/lib6464/libpopt.so.0
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 146988 ***
Dupe.