rsync displays an number of errors when rysncing on gentoo

[eial at cs.bgu.ac.il]

hello, I'm running an Gentoo distribution on my computer, lately I've started to get error messages that are rsync related.
here is a log of the output:

Fetching most recent snapshot
Attempting to fetch file dated: 20080219
portage-20080219.tar.bz2: OK
Syncing local tree...
building file list ...
rsync: link_stat "/var/tmp/emerge-webrsync/portage/180" failed: No such file or directory (2)
121547 files to consider
/
IO error encountered -- skipping file deletion

Number of files: 121547
Number of files transferred: 0
Total file size: 151081538 bytes
Total transferred file size: 0 bytes
Literal data: 0 bytes
Matched data: 0 bytes
File list size: 2837589
File list generation time: 1.433 seconds
File list transfer time: 0.000 seconds
Total bytes sent: 2837599
Total bytes received: 15

sent 2837599 bytes  received 15 bytes  3222.73 bytes/sec
total size is 151081538  speedup is 53.24
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at main.c(1060) [sender=3.0.0pre9]
cleaning up
transferring metadata/cache

>>> Updating Portage cache:  100%

 *** Completed websync, please now perform a normal rsync if possible.
     Update is current as of the of YYYYMMDD: 20080219

Reading Portage settings ..
Building database (/var/cache/eix) ..
[0] "gentoo" /usr/portage/ (cache: metadata)
     Reading 100%
[1] "" /usr/local/portage (cache: none)
     Reading 100%
Applying masks ..
Database contains 12390 packages in 151 categories.

this started about a few days ago when I've updated to rsync 2.6.9-r5, I've tried all other versions on my distribution's package bank.
suspecting in a possible HW failure, I've ran fs checker on the relevant partitions (using reiserfs) which all came back ok, I'm kinda at lost here, no one could help me at gentoo's forums so I thought to try here.
I hope you guys have a fresh perspective on the issue. my system is turion x2 with 1 gigs of ram, 100 GB and nvidia based motherboard.

thanks for the help.