Package elpa archive contents file problem

[david]

package-list-packages and package-initialize started choking with:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument arrayp nil)
  aref(nil 0)
  package-desc-vers(nil)
........
  package-activate(inflections (1 0))
..........
   package-activate(jump (2 0))

It was working until I used the package list buffer last night for
delete and install operations.

The inflections package was installed and deleted in that session.

I've tried package-refresh-contents which did not correct the error. I
have not tried removing the bultin/archive contents files yet.

The latestest version of EmacsW32 (patched) is running on XP SP3 (all
updates applied).

Unfortunately, I made a number of changes to my .emacs file and
compiled libraries including package.el, .emacs and nXhtml load
libraries to reduce startup load time. Gnuserver is timing out.

Which means I've created a huge search space.

While creating this message I remembered the first error encountered
loading compiled libraries was something close to:

function not defined for symbol (find ....

Package.el has a compile time require for CL. So I put a (require 'CL)
just before the package-initialize. It's not unreasonable to speculate
that CL might change semantics of elisp syntax.

Is it possible to load a CL subset? A possible workaround to load the
CL find definition without the part(s) that make (arep nil) false.

That seems unlikely. Stuff like what a basis construct like nil is and
is not would take precedence over syntactic sugar.

This is not directly a package.el problem. The use of the find
function is in YaSnippets. It isn't clear why package.el has an eval-
when-compile (require 'CL) and not at runtime.

I'm a little over my head. Any suggestions, information, etc. would be
very much appreciated. It could also keep me from falling into yet
another black hole. :-) :-|

david