Comment 10 for bug 657494

Finally to rectify I rerun software center with root privileges

sudo software-center

This tells me

"Items cannot be installed or removed until the package catalog is repaired. Do you want to repair it now?"

"Once Update Manager has finished the repairs, you can close it and return to the store."

(Note that it is not actually Update Manager that is running. The text may be worth fixing also.)
I then hit the repair button and it says "Repairing broken deps".

Chrome is still not installed at this point (Ithink, too late to confirm now) but I can rerun my command line and it is installed correctly without error...

tony@mugant-natty:~/Downloads$ sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb
(Reading database ... 133790 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace google-chrome-stable 10.0.648.204-r79063 (using google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement google-chrome-stable ...
Setting up google-chrome-stable (10.0.648.204-r79063) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
debconf: unable to initialize frontend: Dialog
debconf: (Dialog frontend requires a screen at least 13 lines tall and 31 columns wide.)
debconf: falling back to frontend: Readline
Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ...
Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils ...
Processing triggers for python-gmenu ...
Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/desktop.en_US.utf8.cache...
Processing triggers for python-support ...