Comment 8 for bug 772549

Thanks for your bugreport.

Could you please run (in a terminal):
$ killall software-center
$ software-center
and attach the output that produces? From the log it appears that a hanging software-center is still in the background. The log has:

2011-04-28 15:50:14,435 - softwarecenter.db - ERROR - failed to add apt-xapian-index
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/db/database.py", line 142, in open
    axi = xapian.Database("/var/lib/apt-xapian-index/index")
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xapian/__init__.py", line 3458, in __init__
    _xapian.Database_swiginit(self,_xapian.new_Database(*args))
DatabaseOpeningError: Couldn't stat '/var/lib/apt-xapian-index/index' (No such file or directory)
2011-04-28 15:50:14,668 - softwarecenter.view.softwarepane - INFO - discarding new model (6 != 7)
2011-04-28 15:52:11,482 - softwarecenter.fixme - WARNING - logs to the root logger: '('/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/models/appstore.py', 305, '_blocking_perform_search')'
2011-04-28 15:52:11,482 - root - ERROR - get_mset
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/software-center/softwarecenter/models/appstore.py", line 302, in _blocking_perform_search
    matches = enquire.get_mset(0, self.limit, None, xfilter)
DatabaseCorruptError: Data ran out unexpectedly when reading posting list.

So that looks like the xapian index is not build yet (that should be fine) but then the corruption error appears. I wonder
if initially apt-xapian-index is missing but during the course of the usage it got created and that causes the issues.