Comment 5 for bug 295602

Has a similar experience to original poster.

Upgraded from hardy to ibex and all completed successfully, initially.

Rebooted.

hal failed to start due to dbus.

`dpkg --configure hal` failed due to configuring of dbus required
`dpkg --configure dbus` failed due to:

"Warning: The home dir /var/run/dbus you specified can't be accessed: No such file or directory
The system user `messagebus' already exists. Exiting.
chown: cannot access `/var/run/dbus': No such file or directory"

As root simply did `mkdir /var/run/dbus` and reran `dpkg --configure dbus` and all was fine
Ran `dpkg --cofnigure -a` and all packages were successfully configured.

So maybe a line has been missed somewhere on the lines of:
if [ ! -d /var/run/dbus ]
then
  mkdir /var/run/dbus
fi

Just a thought.

phantomjinx