Fedora Users — Cannot use neither rpm nor yum. Error message

I cannot use neither yum nor rpm after I compiled and installed openssl-0.9.8. I did the following before make install:

rpm -e --nodeps openssl
rpm -e --nodeps openssl-devel
make install

when I use rpm I get the following error message:

rpm: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.5 : cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I get a similar message when I use yum. Both utilities seem to need the library libssl.so.5.

Is there any way to resolve this problem? I tried reboot with my installation CD but it does not give me the option to choose
packages. I thought of reinstalling openssl from the CD. I remember with redhat 9 there was an option firstboot, which I
once used to add packages.

======================================================================================

An end user from ittoolbox forum suggested that I use rpm2cpio. My question is how is it that so many utilities depend on this libssl.so.5 file to function? How many utilities and applications depend on this library as a vital component to function? I can't get wget to work as well; I get the same error message. Is there a way to recover from such problem?

I tried rpm2cpio but unfortunately I get the same error message as with rpm and Yum. I tried something else this weekend. I
linked file libssl.a (the library file installed with openssl-0.9.8) to libssl.so.5 but that did not solve the problem as well. The error message has slightly changed;

rpm2cpio :error while loading the shared libraries : /lib/libssl.so.5: invalid ELF header.

I am running an update Fedora Core 4 ver 2.6.17-1.2141_FC4

I am thinking of downloading the source files for openssl-0.9.7f (which was the version supplied with Fedora Core 4)compile and reinstall again. However I doubt whether the libssl.so.5 file will be installed after the make install command.
Is there a way of uninstall an application without using rpm?

Thanks guys for taking your precious time to help me.