Comment 9 for bug 1436834

In response to Erich E. Hoover's last comment, I've looked into the issue and can confirm update-notifer is indeed responsible. I've created a one line fix in case anyone is interested. It simply ensures a path exists before deleting it.

The problematic code resides in package-data-downloader within the update-notifier-common package. You have the option of either patching the installed file or updating the package itself.

To patch the installed file, download the patch then run:
`sudo patch /usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader < ./update-notifier-common-fix.patch`

To patch the package itself, you can do so quite easily with a utility I wrote named debtool (https://github.com/brbsix/debtool). Install debtool, download the patch, then run:

```
# unpack the system's update-notifier-common package into the current directory
debtool -u update-notifier-common

# install patch
patch ./update-notifier-common_*_all/usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader < ./update-notifier-common-fix.patch

# build and reinstall debian package
debtool -z ./update-notifier-common_*_all
```