having trouble installing gtk2.4 and the required libs for gtk2.4

[philip dahlquist <dahlquist kreative net>]

i'm having trouble installing gtk2.4 and it starts way back with glib.

i deleted/renamed all glib2.x libs i could find.
i installed pkgconfig0.14.0 and i installed glib2.4.2 into
/opt/glib-2.4.2. i tried to install atk-1.6.0. and ran its ./configure
script and it said that it needed glib >= 2.0 and all it could find was
glib-2.0.1 despite the fact pkgconfig was reporting glib-2.4.2.

i renamed glib-2.4.2 to old.glib-2.4.2 and tried to run the atk
configure script and it reported that it couldn't find glib and that i
needed to install it.  so, i renamed old.glib back to glib and ran the
atk configure script and it reported that it needed glib >= 2.0 and that
all i had installed was 2.0.1 even though pkgconfig reported that it
found glib-2.4.2. i did set PKG_CONFIG_PATH env variable to the dir that
contained .pc file that it needed.  i ran ldconfig. i put the glib path
in my path var.  i did all the little nit picky stuff that had to be
done.

btw, this is on redhat 7.3 vmlinuz-2.4.20.28.7 on a dell i8200 laptop

so, i figured maybe this was a fluke and decided to try glib-2.2.0.
i tried to install it and the glib configure script said i needed
pkgconfig >= 0.14.0.  i had that.  but i got 0.15.0 and installed that. 
then i redid everything i did in the preceding paragraphs again using
glib-2.2.0. then i tried the atk install again and the config script
said i still only had glib-2.0.1 despite the fact that pkgconfig
reported glib-2.2.0.  

so i'm stuck. and i'm writing this email. and i'm doing all of this
because i want to install gtkmm-2.x because gtk only passes one
variable in it's callback statements and using a structure pointer to
pass two variables didn't work out.

so, anybody got any ideas.

thanks,
philip