Cannot get Texlive to work

[jogojapan]

After following the instructions on Quick Install - TeX Live - TeX Users Group in order to install TexLive on i383-linux in /usr/local/texlive of a machine running Redhat Enterprise Linux release 3 (Taroon Update 7), I ran into the following issue when trying to "latex" or "pdflatex" a simple .tex test file:

?> latex Diss.tex
This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.40.3 (Web2C 7.5.6)
 %&-line parsing enabled.
kpathsea: Running mktexfmt latex.fmt
I can't find the format file `latex.fmt'!

I tried various combinations of "texconfig" and "texconfig-sys" and "fmtutil-sys", using such options as "--enable-fmt latex", "--refresh", "--missing", "--all", but I am still having the problem.

I installed TexLive as user "root", but I tried the above both as "root" and as an ordinary user.

The options I chose during the installation were as follows:
- I removed several language-specific packages
- I removed several of the documentation packages
- I enabled the "install essential binaries" option [because, from its name, it seems to be essential]

But I also tried a flat installation with no options changed (after removing the previous installation). None of this had any impact on the situation.

Does anybody on this forum know more about this problem?

[jogojapan]

This was resolved by unsetting the TEXINPUTS environment variable (which had erroneously been set to point to various directories by .bashrc).