Hoary Hosed: synaptic in dependency hell

[Kevin O'Gorman]

My Warty never made it all the way to Hoary.  The problem of most
pressing importance
is that synaptic is complaining so much I cannot tell what is working
and what is not when
I try to use it.

It reports "dependency problems -- left unconfigured" on these packages:
  at
  anacron
  mutt
  mailx
  postfix
  postfix-tls

And even attempts to reinstall them get the error messages.  Attempts
to delete them
also threaten to delete 'lsb' and/or 'ubuntu-base', which does not
seem like a good idea.

How do I clear this up, so that I can go about my business?

++ kevin

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD