Dapper updates crash desktop - please enlighten

[John Dangler]

Dapper 6.06 LTS
I've been having an annoying "updates skipped" problem for about 2
weeks, where totem, totem-gstreamer, and the linux kernel and
linux-restricted-modules updates were being skipped.

Someone from the list suggested apt-get remove --purge totem
totem-gstreamer as a way to remove the first two.  Since I'm using Xine,
I thought that that made sense.

sudo apt-get remove --purge totem totem-gstreamer worked fine, and in
fact, the next synaptic update informed me that the new linux headers
and linux-restricted-modules were available (2.6.15.27) for download.
However, the desktop seemed to hang while the "downloading change
descriptions" was running.  It stayed locked up for over 20 minutes,
and, as much as I am entirely against the process, I hard-booted the
workstation.  Other than the fact that I had to kill gdm, and manually
remove and install my nvidia kernel module again (not sure why it didn't
get installed on a reboot), gnome seemed to come up ok. The automatic
update notification was lit, so I selected it to see what it would now
show as available.  My screen went black.  I couldn't get another
terminal this time, either, so again, I had to hard boot the
workstation, and again, X failed to start.  re-installing the nvidia
module, killing gdm and running gdm again brought gnome back.  Again I
selected the automatic updates.  This time, I ran apt-get update from a
terminal, then apt-get upgrade and was told that the linux image and
restricted modules would be held back.  I then ran apt-get install
linux-image-386 and was told that 2.6.15-27 would be installed.  I
installed the new kernel version, and, after compiling a new nvidia
kernel module and installing it, I was able to get gnome back again.
I still had to manually install the restricted modules after this as a
separate process, but gnome seems to be back up and running ok now.

Prologue
automatic update is borked (at least on this machine in combination with
having removed totem and totem-gstreamer).  I have ubuntu Dapper running
on my laptop as well, and have not seen this crashing (although I have
the same "skipped" messages on the laptop and haven't yet removed them).

I can't see the connection between removing totem and locking up the
desktop to a state where a hard boot is necessary.

Oddly enough, when I looked into the nvidia driver situation, there are
two versions.  dmesg and the Xinit log report a mismatch between the
version wanted and the version loaded, which causes me to remove the
older one and reload the newer one on every reboot.