pg_catalog.pg_roles DESTROYED?

I'm preparing to upgrade a 7.4.7 DB to 8.2.4.
I just got connectivity from new to old (different hosts), and being
a newhire and no-one had ever done any maintenance on the old DB, I
connected as joe-user to the old DB using the client of the new.
(joe-user is the owner of the DB)

I did some analyze and vacuum-ing on two tables.
The last thing I did there was
>vacuum full verbose tablename;
I did it twice to see the differing results.
It was HUGE and now is smaller.

I next tried to do a \dt and suddenly....

airburst=> \dt
ERROR: relation "pg_catalog.pg_roles" does not exist

None of the \d - commands work.

Only if I go in as PG super can I avoid that error. (Going in
locally after logging into that box.)

I'm new to PG myself, so I'd appreciate it if I had some hand-holding.

Thank you!
Ralph Smith