How can I get out of this annoying state?

[Taka Fukuda]

    Greetings,
    
    I am quite a new MacOS X user, and I happened to fall
    into a very annoying situation as follows...
    
    When I tried to remove a package, I got
    
fukuda at quadra:~% sudo port -f uninstall perl5.8
--->  Unable to uninstall perl5.8 5.8.8_0+darwin_8, the following ports depend on it:
--->    p5-xml-parser
--->    autoconf
--->    automake
--->    gnome-mime-data
--->    vnc
Warning: Uninstall forced.  Proceeding despite dependencies.
--->  Uninstalling perl5.8 5.8.8_0+darwin_8

    It seemed that the uninstall was successful, but when I
    tried to install it, I got 
    
fukuda at quadra:~% sudo port -f install perl5.8  
--->  Installing perl5.8 5.8.8_0+darwin_8
Error: Target com.apple.install returned: Registry error: perl5.8 5.8.8_0+darwin_8 already registered as installed.  Please uninstall it first.
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.
fukuda at quadra:~% 

    I repeated these commands with some other options, but
    none of them did not work.  As a result, I cannot
    install or uninstall Perl, and this prohibits porting of
    many other packages.
    
    Could you show me how to get out of this situation?

    Thanks,
    
-- 
--                                               Taka Fukuda
--                                    fukuda at computer.org