I experienced problems importing the 20060817 enwiki dumps using MediaWiki 1.7.1 with the machine translation project, so I put together a bzip2 package with MediaWiki 1.7.1 with all the extensions and PHP fixes necessary to use the Wikipedia enwiki dumps which also includes all the support extensions for Native Cherokee and other Machine translation projects. The updated bzip2 package may be useful to others since the released MediaWiki 1.7.1 does not run with the XML dumps currently published by the Wikimedia Foundation without all these fixes and extensions included and configured.
ftp://www.wikigadugi.org/wiki/MediaWiki/mediawiki-1.7.1.WG-20060904.tar.gz.bz2
Jeff