Comment 8 for bug 121341

AMD64 7.04 install, fully up to date, and then chose to upgrade to the new 7.10 installation that was available with the GUI. It worked quite happily for a while and got to the stage of downloading lots of files. Left it to it. Now it's hung. The GUI is still present and responds to X expose events but nothing's happening. The end of dist-upgrade/apt.log says

 Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/usr/share/apport/package_hook", line 15, in <module>
     import apport, apport.fileutils
 ImportError: No module named apport

Some of the running processes include

 10757 pts/0 Ss+ 0:00 /usr/bin/python /tmp/tmpurZIGY/gutsy --have-prerequists --with-network
 20408 pts/0 S+ 0:00 /bin/sh /var/lib/dpkg/info/ttf-indic-fonts-core.postinst configure
 20420 pts/0 D+ 0:02 [fc-cache]
 32245 pts/0 S+ 0:01 /tmp/tmpurZIGY/backports/usr/bin/dpkg --force-overwrite --status-fd 4 --configure libc6-i386 linux-libc-dev libc6

32245 is sitting in waitpid().

If this bug is the cause of a 7.04 to 7.10 failure I can't believe that it's sitting here as High importance yet users are still allowed to topple into its abyss by upgrading to 7.10. What do I do to recover?