yet another 'upgrading GTK' thread
 

using:mdk 9.2
i updated my atk,pango,glib,pkg config packages without much problem
now im trying to upgrade GTK..i got the latest version source
i used './configure --prefix=/etc' then make/make install

but no other progs that need GTK detect the correct version (eg=gaim)
there r msgs during 'make install' to set my LD_LIB_PATH and stuff...
those came during installing the other packages but i didnt do anything.

how to i configure/install gtk to make it visible to everything

do you still have the old version RPM installed?

dunno
the older version of gtk came with mdk's installation

What you're doing is bad practice, you should not mix RPMs with source tarball installs. By default in most cases these source installs goes into /usr/local, while RPMs install into /usr.
If you want to upgrade GTK from the source thats ok, either get a source RPM for the newer version and compile it(or modify the source RPM spec file to create a newer version), compile the source into an RPM yourself, or try to find an updated RPM package compiled for your distro, which is the best choice.
If you really want to install from the source thats ok, you'll need to remove the RPM gtk packages so they don't conflict. Keep in mind that source installs won't satisfy RPM dependency, in the future if you try to install any RPM that depends on GTK, it will complain.
Also after you upgrade if any other packages depending on gtk goes haywire, you'll need to recompile them.

It's a really bad idea to upgrade GTK in some cases as it can break software. A better idea is to simply upgrade your distribution.