invalid checksum error in pear install

After a fresh install of Redhat 9, I was having problems doing "pear install xxx" because it works sometimes and breaks at other times. It came to a point when "pear install Archive_Tar" wouldn't work while "pear help install Archive_Tar" works. I'm using the stock php rpms that Redhat 9 provides. (php 4.2.1) It appears that the pear installer is an old version because it doesn't understand "pear upgrade-all" Therefore I decide to do an "pear upgrade PEAR" command. It works but installs the new pear script under /usr/bin/scripts. I copy /usr/bin/scripts/pear into /usr/bin/pear. Now the pear installer is updated. Now, I can't install new packages anymore because all install or upgrade commands download the package but terminates with a message: "Invalid checksum : 65136 calculated, 0 expected" My "pear list" shows the following:

| Package        | Version | State  |
| Archive_Tar    | 1.0     | stable |
| Auth           | 1.2.0   | stable |
| Auth_HTTP      | 1.0.1   | stable |
| Cache_Lite     | 1.1     | stable |
| Console_Getopt | 1.0     | stable |
| DB             | 1.4b1   | beta   |
| PEAR           | 1.0.1   | stable |
| XML_RPC        | 1.0.4   | stable |
| XML_Tree       | 1.1     | stable |