Yesterday afternoon, I did a successful update from production 7.2 to 
production 7.3 through yumex.  In addition to the SL production 
repositories, I use the epel, elrepo, and google-chrome repositories for 
specific add-ons, including nvidia support.  I only use kernels from 
SL.  Although the update was slow, it taking a very long time for the 
nvidia portion to complete cleanup (I left after a 5 minute wait), when 
I came back this morning, everything appears to be working, including 
applications that have not been touched since I first installed SL 7 
(e.g., UCSF chimera, Weizmann grace).  The machine to which this was 
done has a 802.3 wired connection to a USA university research 
backbone.  The next thing to update is my laptop that has a 802.11 
connection to a production network, significantly lower data rate.  Is 
there any way to get a list of the required RPMs, download and burn 
these to a DVD, and then have yumex use the DVDs, only going to the 
network to get additional RPMs that turn out to be needed?

Yasha Karant