Comment 4 for bug 962393

Maybe the problem is that software-center spawns debconf-communicate with the user id instead of as root:

alkisg 7368 1.7 0.5 65404 23364 pts/1 Sl+ 07:48 0:00 /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/bin/debconf-communicate

I tried making a debconf-communicate wrapper, to force running it as root instead, and everything worked fine again:
$ cat /usr/bin/debconf-communicate
#!/bin/sh
exec sudo -E /usr/bin/debconf-communicate.real "$@"

Of course to avoid sudo prompts, I've setup sudoers to not require a password for debconf-communicate.real for my user id.