Comment 6 for bug 133050

This just happened out of the blue on my system (Ubuntu 10.10 on a 32 bit x86 computer).
Whatever the reason is, the way how this error is handled seems to prevent any use of the graphical programs that are package related: synaptic terminates after showing the error message and the update manager shows a dialog with the error "Could not initialise the package information" "An unresolvable problem occurred while initialising the package information. Please report this bug for the update-manager package and try to include the following error message:" "E:Malformed 3rd word in the Status line, E:Error occurred while processing libboost-program-options1.40.0 (UsePackage2) E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/dpkg/status, E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened."

The first bug here is that the actual line where this problem occurs is not included in the error message.
Doing "sudo dpkg --configure -a" can be used to figure this out -- this command shows: "dpkg: parse error, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 96097 package 'libboost-program-options1.40.0':
 `config-fines' is not allowed for third (status) word in `status' field"

So for some reason the file contains "config-fines" and not config-files. I edited this with "sudo vi".

However, whatever caused this problem, the user should not end up with a state where both synaptic and the package manager are unusable and severe command line hacking has to be used to get out of this. Something much more user-friendly has to be done here.