The problem was with selecting (clicking on) libtelepathy-logger2 in "Not Installed (Residual Config)". libtelepathy-logger2 shows no "Installed version", "Available version", etc, in the listing. This package was just replaced, if I remember correctly, by libtelepathy-logger3 in an update (with lt-l2 remaining installed as far as I could tell), but beyond that I don't know what about this package should cause synaptic to misbehave. The package was successfully removed after the crash with apt-get remove --purge libtelepathy-logger2, and synaptic no longer misbehaves.
From duplicate:
The problem was with selecting (clicking on) libtelepathy- logger2 in "Not Installed (Residual Config)". libtelepathy- logger2 shows no "Installed version", "Available version", etc, in the listing. This package was just replaced, if I remember correctly, by libtelepathy- logger3 in an update (with lt-l2 remaining installed as far as I could tell), but beyond that I don't know what about this package should cause synaptic to misbehave. The package was successfully removed after the crash with apt-get remove --purge libtelepathy- logger2, and synaptic no longer misbehaves.