In my SL5, i386 computer, with the yum-priorities rpm installed, in 
/etc/yum.repos.d the sl-contrib repository has "priority=10", the dag 
repository has "priority=30", and the epel repository has no priority set. 
According to

http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities

"Packages from repositories with a lower priority will never be used to 
upgrade packages that were installed from a repository with a higher 
priority." and it also says "The default priority for repositories is 99. 
The repositories with the lowest numerical priority number have the 
highest priority."  If I'm right about why you couldn't get the ntfs-3g 
version you wanted, it might also work to leave sl-contrib enabled, but 
add "priority=10" to the [epel] section of epel.repo.  But since most 
repositories, including sl-security, have "priority=10", I'm worried that 
epel could then replace SL security updates, for example.  So it may be 
safer to instead remove the "priority=10" line in the sl-contrib repo, or 
just temporarily disable sl-contrib, as I previously suggested.

Steven Yellin

On Fri, 16 Dec 2011, Steven J. Yellin wrote:

>    Although the version of ntfs-3g with libntfs-3g.so.81 is in epel, 
> according to the output of your 'yum --enablerepo=epel install ntfs-3g' 
> command, yum got ntfs-3g from the sl-contrib repository.  Two relevant lines 
> of your output are:
>
>> Package      Arch       Version          Repository     Size
>> ntfs-3g      i386     2:1.1104-3.sl5     sl-contrib    147 k
>
> So here's an hypothesis about what's going on: maybe sl-contrib is enabled, 
> has a version of ntfs-3g that's older than the one you want, and yum doesn't 
> look in epel once it's satisfied with what it learned from sl-contrib.  Try 
> disabling sl-contrib.  And you might also do 'yum clean all'.   Then I'll bet 
> an update will get Version 2:2011.4.12-5.el5.
>
> Steven Yellin
>