Permission denied to shared libraries and can't use yum

I was notified on an issue with a Centos 6.3 server this past weekend. I've been looking around google for most of the morning trying to figure out what they did to the system, but haven't been successful in fixing it yet.

When trying to run yum I receive the following error:

There was a problem importing one of the Python modules
required to run yum. The error leading to this problem was:

   /usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/pycurl.so: undefined symbol: CRYPTO_set_locking_callback

Please install a package which provides this module, or
verify that the module is installed correctly.

It's possible that the above module doesn't match the
current version of Python, which is:
2.6.6 (r266:84292, Jul 10 2013, 22:48:45)
[GCC 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-3)]

When trying to start httpd/apache I get:
Starting httpd: /usr/sbin/httpd: error while loading shared libraries: libpcre.so.0: failed to map segment from shared object: Permission denied

and when rebooting the server I receive the following:
/sbin/shutdown: error while loading shared libraries: libgcc_s.so.1: failed to map segment from shared object: Permission denied

To see if I could get httpd service to start, I tried disabling SELinux. The service DID start and reboot error message went away. Using Yum still is not working though. When apache did start the website displayed the following error:

"Message: preg_match(): Compilation failed: this version of PCRE is not compiled with PCRE_UTF8 support at offset 0"

and reading this http://bsdsupport.org/fixing-pcre_utf8-errors-in-freebsd/ it points back to libpcre permission problem.

So how would I go about the fixing these issues? It looks like a permissions and python problems, but I don't know what to try next. Any ideas?

The only thing the user who reported problem said they did was change the username/group that apache uses in the httpd.conf file.