Yast Error

Hello SuSE people. Tonight I went to install the package sharutils from the 9.2 disks. It would not install and gave me the following error. I have no idea what it means. Anybody can explain/rectify this??? --------------------------------------------------------------------- ERROR(InstTarget:E_RpmDB_subprocess_failed) --- error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Operation not permitted (1) error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm --------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks for any help/guidance. Bob S.