Comment 8 for bug 673350

You might be correct in looking at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=430958 except that:

 - I've not had any system crashes which might cause this

 - the version of dpkg I have is 1.15.8.4ubuntu1 (i386) and in the bug list you pointed out the lists a fix in 1.15.6. Do you think it's a goo idea to go back in revisions of such a major part of the system?

 - no disk full problems.
 bob$ df .
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 471793992 91693244 356135004 21% /

 - I've got a number of empty list files in var/lib/dpkg/info/. I think this is getting scary:

       find . -empty | wc
    110 110 2437

This is out of 2400+ packages installed.

And the disks on the system:

bob$ cat /etc/mtab
/dev/sda1 / ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0 0 0
proc /proc proc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
none /sys sysfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw 0 0
none /sys/kernel/debug debugfs rw 0 0
none /sys/kernel/security securityfs rw 0 0
none /dev devtmpfs rw,mode=0755 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620 0 0
none /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev 0 0
none /var/run tmpfs rw,nosuid,mode=0755 0 0
none /var/lock tmpfs rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sdb /media/Mirror ext4 rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0 0 0
rpc_pipefs /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw 0 0
nfsd /proc/fs/nfsd nfsd rw 0 0
binfmt_misc /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /media/8dca643b-5736-4dab-a93e-e9a448966735 ext3 rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks 0 0
gvfs-fuse-daemon /home/bob/.gvfs fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon rw,nosuid,nodev,user=bob 0 0

Fortunately, emacs is working just fine :)

Oh, and early on in this process I did delete/remove a2ps and auctex and everything else i could find related to emacs. In fact I manually deleted all the emacs in /usr/share, /usr/bin, and /etc. No joy.

I'll continue to debug from my end. I'm sure I'm not the only one with the problem and would really like to get it figured out!

Best.