[gentoo-dev] Portage killed. Any help?

[Christian Hergl <weehawk@weehawk.de>]

Hello list,

some time ago I tried to finish my gentoo system to get it work ready. 
Amoung other packages, I had a baselayout-1.6.1 AND baselayout-1.6.2 
installted, together with portage-1.6.11.
Ok, now I thought I shall be brave and update to baselayout-1.6.5 to get 
rid of any mess in my startup-scripts (have had a few...).
I also updated to portage-1.7.1, all seemed to work fine. Until to the 
next reboot.
Now all I get when typing 'emerge' is:

!!! Invalid token (not "=") B
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/emerge", line 301, in ?
   if not portage.settings.has_key ("MAINTAINTER"):
File "/usr/lib/python2.0/site-packages/portage.py", line 496, in has_key
   if x.has_key(mykey):
AttributeError: 'None' object has no attribute 'has_key'

Uhm..... help? Please? Well, I have a (sort of, it seems) running system 
now, but without portage, I can't update anymore anything and would be 
stuck!
The emerge baselayout did seem to work well, and I worked to the .000x 
startup files in /etc. It seemse though that something got messed up, 
and I simply don't know where.
Also, if I ever get portage working again, would it be safe to unmerge 
the old baselayouts? I'm not very trusting anymore which of which 
packages are still needed and which not...

Thanks all in advance,

your confused

Christian