I've been experiencing some strange behavior with rubygems.
>
> Background:
>
> Solaris 10 x86
> ruby 1.8.4
> rubygems-0.9.2
>
> I dont' have access to the default rubygems repository, so I'm trying 
> to set one up in my user dir. I know about the poisoned gem index 
> thing and I've removed all the old cache files... so I'm pretty sure 
> that's not where the problem lies. Anyway, I setup my GEM_HOME 
> environment variable, downloaded rubygems 0.9.2 and installed it in my 
> home directory using:
>
> |$ ruby setup.rb config --prefix=/path/to/my/home
> $ ruby setup.rb setup
> $ ruby setup.rb install

Ok, I figured out the problem, I just had to setup an environment variable:

RUBYLIB=:/path/to/my/home/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8

That fixed it.

Oddly enough, I don't see this information anywhere on the rubygems 
manual page:
http://rubygems.org/read/chapter/3#page83