Comment 4 for bug 573214

The solution was that I first had to remove all texlive packages and then select and installed them again. There could have been a dependency problem.

Now latex works properly again.

(before that I received the message:
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
---! /var/lib/texmf/web2c/pdftex/latex.fmt doesn't match pdftex.pool
(Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)
)