Okay, much better. I did the three commands that serhatu suggests
http://beta.ozgurlukicin.com/forum/nasil/18/?page=3and now it is downloading the kernel and its dependencies, which should take about 1.5 hours. I can handle that!
Thanks all for checking out my problem. I thought I'd read about rebuilding the database somewhere on this site to solve a package manager problem. Tried to find it, but couldn't.
Serhatu's suggestions:
~ $ sudo pisi dc
Password:
me@me-pardus ~ $ sudo pisi rdb
Rebuild PiSi databases? (yes/no)yes
~ $ sudo pisi up
Updating repositories
* Updating repository: pardus-2008.1