Unable to find libraries after installing with RPM and then with source code

[John]

I'm using RedHat Fedora and installed Python 2.2 using an RPM.  I then built
and installed Python 2.3 using "./configure", "make" and "make install".  A
lot of programs won't run now and give me the following error message:

Could not find platform independent libraries <prefix>
Could not find platform dependent libraries <exec-prefix>
Consider settint $PYTHONHOME to <prefix[:<exec_prefix>]
.....
ImportError: No module named getopt (or some other module name)

The reason for this is that it is trying to import from /usr/lib/python2.2
but these modules are now in /usr/local/lib/python2.3.  Is there any way of
getting these programs to look in the right place for these modules?  Did I
install the latest version incorrectly?  Do I perhaps need to uninstall all
the packages that use python2.2 and reinstall them?

Thanks for any help