I had to rebuild the deltarpm rpm locally, since it needed the rpm-4.6.0 and popt that are used on releng02.
I just put this in place, so we will see if it helps us figure out whats going on with those deltas.
to revert:
change 'makedeltarpm -vv' back to 'makedeltarpm -v' in /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/createrepo/deltarpms.py
and
cd ~kevin/drpm/ rpm -Uvh --oldpackage --replacepkgs deltarpm-3.5-0.5.20090913git.el5.i386.rpm python-deltarpm-3.5-0.5.20090913git.el5.i386.rpm
Thanks everyone.
kevin