Force removal of installed packages?

[Ed Smits]

My son's Dapper has gotten screwed up - he installed something called
Donkey, it doesn't work correctly, and since then Synaptic et al are
acting up and he can neither install new updates or programs. When I
tried to remove donkey using Synaptic it errors out with:

E: mldonkey-server: subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit status 1

Update Manager states that he has broken packages and to run either
apt-get -f from the command line or else use Synaptic to find and fix
broken packages. Neither works - when you filter for broken packages
in Synaptic it finds 6, then run fix broken, it says they are fixed,
and then informs me that it needs to install 1 new lib file and remove
119 other files (including most of the software he uses). Since we of
course don't want to do that we hit cancel, and the next time we run
Synaptic or Update we again have 6 broken packages.

Since the problem started with Donkey I thought if I could force a
removal it might fix the problem. I know that in FC there was an
argument to force a package removal, is there something similar for
.deb packages? If there isn't, can anyone suggest how we can get
Synaptic working again without uninstalling and reinstalling 119
packages?

His version of donkey is (if that matters):

pF  mldonkey-server                        2.7.1-2ubuntu2   Door to
the 'donkey' network

Cheers to all. This list has been a big help to me as I convert my
family over to Ubuntu - so far 4 new users/laptops + my own.

ED