With my limited understanding, all *.la files should be deleted. They contain information for libtool, that libtool can find without them, but if some exist, libtool expects all of them to exist(?). Some packages mistakenly create them, so whenever I have a problem building a package, the first thing I do is delete /usr/lib/*.la and /usr/lib64/*.la. This doesn't always fix things, but it has never made the problems worse.
Galen
