You need to update to the latest libxml on your system.
But I'm not sure that's the problem ... were there any errors in the log file? After it loads the core datamodel it does read the package info files. This can take a few minutes, and of course this is where the XML parse comes into play. It's possible you just didn't wait long enough. It's also possible that the old XML support on your system caused this code to die - in which case I'd expect an error message in your log file.
