Something is broken in apt/dpkg, how to recover?

[Chris Green]

On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 10:05:56AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> Something is very broken in the depths of apt/dpkg/synaptic on my
> system.
> 
> Any attempt at running apt-get results in a segmentation fault and
> also any attempt to run synaptic fails - it authenticates then the GUI
> appears but before it populates with lists etc. it crashes.
> 
> I *suspect* that it's something in the 'update' part of apt that's
> broken, if I do "show details" on the crash report from synaptic it
> says the executable is /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check.py.
> 
> How do I fix this?  I can't use synaptic or apt to reinstall anything.
> 
Further information, if I run /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check.py it
just core dumps, which is rather odd for a Python program.  How can I
diagnose further?

-- 
Chris Green