At the last meeting I told some friendly people I had problems with 'synaptic', 'aptitude', and 'apt-get' all crashing with a "Bus Error" on my Ubuntu installation. They all began to work again after I ran 'dselect'; I assume 'dselect' somehow repaired the package database while updating it.

Yay: a grave bug in the APT package management system has been hidden away until Next Time! :-)

I mention this because the friendly people (whose names I'm sorry I can't remember) said to describe my problem again on the mailing list.