Comment 9 for bug 1173372

I ran into a similar problem the other day when trying to install drivers for my Broadcom wireless card. It seems that the dkpg process tree was hung up on 'modprobe'.

I was able to force stop (ctrl-z) and run lxtask (using `sudo lxtask`). From lxtask I was able to follow the process tree and restart the processes beginning with the sudo process.
The process was still not getting anywhere so I killed the modprobe process and waited a few minutes. After exiting lxtask I was able to run apt-get update. The package manager (GUI included) seems to be working fine now.

Hopefully that helps. If not, feel free to ask questions.

I am so far still unsuccessful in my attempts to access wi-fi, but I was able to get the package manager working again. For what it's worth, I'm running Lubuntu 13.4(raring). Hopefully I'll have more luck with Bodhi or LXLE.