apropos in man corrupted ! - howto fix ?

["Geoffrey L. Brimhall" <brimhall@pobox.com>]

At some point, my apropos has gotten corrupted so that it never returns
anything.

I've tried un-installing man-db, and re-installing it, but it apropos still
does not work.

Though I'm not sure if this has anything to do with it, when I issue 'catman' as
super-user, I get the following error:

catman: cannot read database /var/catman/index.bt: No such file or directory
catman: unable to update /usr/man
catman: cannot read database /var/catman/local/index.bt: No such file or
directory
catman: unable to update /usr/local/man
catman: cannot read database /var/catman/X11R6/index.bt: No such file or
directory
catman: unable to update /usr/X11R6/man

At one point I had suspected that maybe a slink upgrade which I did caused the
corruption, so I have downgraded to installing the man-db that came with hamm.