Software updater no longer functional

[MR ZenWiz]

On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 2:37 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 19 January 2017 at 21:51, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
>> About a week ago I noticed that my indicator for the software updater
>> had turned into the "do not enter" road sign (a red circle with a
>> horizontal white line in it).
>>
>> If I click on it, it shows me the menu, but none of the menu items works.
>>
>> If I open the settings app and click on the software updater once, it
>> does nothing.  If I double click it, it says I have stopped previous
>> updates from functioning and shows them.  However, if I click on the
>> Install Now button, the updater small frame window comes up empty and
>> never shows anything.
>>
>> I posted about some of this a while back when it was getting errors
>> with the debconf library, but that was solved, or so I thought, by
>> using Synaptic to update that library.  It seems this was not a
>> complete fix.
>>
>> Any suggestions?
>
> Does you see any errors if you run, in a terminal,
> sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
>
> and do you still see the problem after running the upgrade?
>
No and yes, in that order.

Thanks.