Comment 2 for bug 560237

Of course you can't upgrade all the time. You can upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 or from 8.04 to 10.04 but you can't upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 to 9.10 to 10.04 and still think that everything will work ;-)

Why don't you just save your few files on an usb stick and do a fresh Lucid install?