The problem turned out to be the lack of any sort of warning or error messages from anaconda.
I'd been testing an ftp server while in my cvs tree and accidentally ended up with a copy of libtermcap.so in one of my rpms and rpm had decided to list that as something my package was providing.
So when anaconda ran into the circular dependancy, it didn't bother to complain at all and just installed everything in alphabetic order.
Lame.