autofs conflicts with cyrus-sasl-lib - CentOS 5 x86_64

An update of autofs on RH and CentOS has broken yum for some people (x86_64) as the CentOS repos do not have a current enough package of cyrus-sasl-lib .i386 version (only 2.1.22-4). If yum update is reporting:

--> Processing Conflict: autofs conflicts cyrus-sasl-lib < 2.1.22-5.el5_4.3
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
1:autofs-5.0.1-0.rc2.143.el5.x86_64 from base has depsolving problems
--> autofs conflicts with cyrus-sasl-lib
You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
You could try running: package-cleanup --problems
package-cleanup --dupes
rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest


Then here is a possible solution.

First ensure what packages you have installed on the 64-bit system, you probably have both the .i386 and .x86_64 packages.

To determine what you have:
rpm -qa | grep cyrus
yum list installed | grep cyrus


It is likely that you have both the .i386 and x86_64 packages installed and although you may find that you have the correct x86_64 version:
cyrus-sasl-lib.x86_64 2.1.22-5.el5_4.3 installed

You will probably also find you have:
cyrus-sasl-lib.i386 2.1.22-4 installed

You will probably also find that you are not exluding all 32 bit packages in your /etc/yum.conf, even if you have:
exclude=*.i386

That is not enough it needs to be:
exclude=*.i386 *.i586 *.i686

Anyhow, remove the cyrus-sasl-lib.i386 package (this will remove cyrus-sasl-plain.i386 0:2.1.22-4 as well) and then yum update will stop reporting the error.

yum remove cyrus-sasl-lib.i386