NPM / NODEJS installation issues [RESOLVED]

Yesterday I decided to give node.js and socket.io a shot and make something good out of it. The first thing that we do is install stuff right.. So I thought I'd go the easy way, wget all the installable packages from nodejs.org for the mac and I was hoping things would be stable.

But 'not' to my surprise (as this keeps on happening), when I started out using npm (the package manager or let's just say the easy_install python alias) that comes with the latest installer started giving me issues like the following whenever I typed npm install socket.io or even npm -v(to check the version) for that matter -

node.js:201

        throw e; // process.nextTick error, or 'error' event on first tick

              ^

Error: No such module

    at Object. (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/lib/utils/config-defs.js:5:21)

    at Module._compile (module.js:441:26)

    at Object..js (module.js:459:10)

    at Module.load (module.js:348:31)

    at Function._load (module.js:308:12)

    at Module.require (module.js:354:17)

    at require (module.js:370:17)

    at Object. (/usr/lib/node_modules/npm/lib/utils/ini.js:43:18)

    at Module._compile (module.js:441:26)

    at Object..js (module.js:459:10)

After a good two hours of figuring out what the problem was (is the repo not updated? do I have the older version of npm that it doesn't let me even check the version of it? ..), turns out the installer installs two versions of npm - 

- One at /usr/bin/npm : The older version

- The other at /usr/local/bin/npm The latest version

Now as soon as I deleted the older version and all its dependencies on /usr/bin/npm and logged in again, the bash now picks up the newer version now and I'm happily using npm. 

Hope this helps someone with a mac.