[gentoo-user] Portage corrupted? Trying to install non-existant packages

[Calvin Spealman]

I've been having some trouble with portage for over a month now, but I've also been in the middle of a move across several states. Finally having my box set up again, I'm ready to tackle the strange issues I'm finding. I need some help, I've gotten some of the problems out of the way, but they always just uncover something else that is wrong with it. Portage keeps trying to update packages that don't exist, so when I try to 'emerge -a world', it fails every time because one or more of the packages it wants to upgrade, it can't even find as existing.

Calculating world dependencies /
emerge: there are no ebuilds to satisfy ">=media-sound/mad-0.14.2b-r1".


!!! Problem with ebuild app-cdr/k3b-5
!!! Possibly a DEPEND/*DEPEND problem.

!!! Depgraph creation failed.

Obviously, neither of these packages actually exist.

I tried a portage sync, downloading a tarball of the tree in case the sync was broken too, and even downloading a binary package of portage executables and files, but none of it had any affect on whats going on. This leads me to believe the problem lies somewhere outside of any of the files that would be affected by what I've tried so far, but I don't know what those files would be. Does anyone know where my next clues might lay? I could backup and reinstall, but I'm determined to get to the bottom of this strange behavior.