The symlinking in vim works fine for me and all symlinks point where they should point to. It's on purpose that /usr/bin/vim becomes the more powerful binary after gvim gets installed. This is reversed on uninstall. And it works reliably for a long time now.

$ ls -l /usr/bin/vi*
0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 3. Mär 19:55 /usr/bin/vi -> /usr/bin/vim*
0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 1. Mär 13:49 /usr/bin/view -> vim*
24K -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21K 2. Feb 17:17 /usr/bin/viewres*
4,1M -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4,1M 21. Dez 22:57 /usr/bin/vim*
$ ls /usr/bin/gvi*
0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 3. Mär 19:55 /usr/bin/gview -> gvim*
0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 3. Mär 19:55 /usr/bin/gvim -> /usr/bin/vim*
0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 3. Mär 19:55 /usr/bin/gvimdiff -> gvim*
$ pacman -Su

Targets: gvim-7.0.191-1

Total Package Size: 1.9 MB

Proceed with upgrade? [Y/n]

checking package integrity... done.
loading package data... done.
checking for file conflicts... done.
recovering symlink names and binaries...done
upgrading gvim... done.
updating desktop and mime database...
moving symlinks to make vim binary more capable...mv: accessing `/usr/bin/vi': Too many levels of symbolic links
mv: accessing `/usr/bin/vim': Too many levels of symbolic links
done
Updating vim help tags...done.
$ ls -l /usr/bin/vi*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 4. Mär 11:06 /usr/bin/vi -> /usr/bin/vim
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 1. Mär 13:49 /usr/bin/view -> vim
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 21K 2. Feb 17:17 /usr/bin/viewres*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 3. Mär 19:55 /usr/bin/vim -> /usr/bin/vim
$ ls -l /usr/bin/gvi*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 4. Mär 11:06 /usr/bin/gview -> gvim
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 4. Mär 11:06 /usr/bin/gvim -> /usr/bin/vim
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 4. Mär 11:06 /usr/bin/gvimdiff -> gvim

Notice how /usr/bin/vim -> /usr/bin/vim is broken.
This is on x86_64 btw.

Seems that this is caused by leftover symlinks when removing gvim 7.0.178-1.
pacman -R gvim; rm all leftover symlinks; pacman -S gvim seems to make gvim 7.0.191-1 work.

i also have this sometimes. looks like it happens only on x86_64. it's easy to fix. simply pacman -R vim gvim, then check for remaining unwanted links, rm them and reinstall your holy editor.

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2006-05/msg00679.html - you might want to try that patch over our stock kernel. but read the warning some apps might stop working.

right now kernel.org looks overloaded again. can you check for "nesting level" , "namei.h" and "MAX_NESTED_LINKS" later?

forget the patch. we have it already set to that value.

i cannot see exactly where the error is caused. i know it as i had it a few times myself. you reported what causes the trouble:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 3. Mär 19:55 /usr/bin/vim -> /usr/bin/vim

This might happen in some update/reinstall process structure I cannot reproduce here. i think the reason is in the post install script that may sometime mix it too much up:

post_install() {
echo "updating desktop and mime database..."
update-desktop-database -q
echo -n "moving symlinks to make vim binary more capable..."
mv -f /usr/bin/vim /usr/bin/vi
mv -f /usr/bin/gvim /usr/bin/vim
ln -sf /usr/bin/vim /usr/bin/gvim
echo "done"
echo -n "Updating vim help tags..."
/usr/bin/vim --noplugins -u NONE -U NONE \
--cmd ":helptags /usr/share/vim/doc" --cmd ":q" > /dev/null 2>&1
echo "done."
}

the same is called after upgrading the package. it doesn't look bad but might get confused if you had removed packages with pacman -Rd or with --noscriptlet.

I don't see why this should be architecture dependend so I'm going to reassign it to the 32bit maintainer. May he close it as not fixable/works for him.

It's always easy to fix when it happens: just remove all remaining files and symlinks for vi/vim/gvim and reinstall the packages.

status in the newest version?