I went and tried doing an upgrade from lenny to squeeze on a friend's computer who is located several states away from me. Huge mistake! As a result of that attempt, the packages situation can't be fixed not even with dpkg --configure -a and aptitude is disabled from working and apt-get -f install and apt-get -f remove can't do anything to help the situation. Grub also can't be upgraded since problems with the boot sector were found. My friend has got pretty many files he can probably download again already on the system and I hope the burn script will work for him so he can at least burn those to DVD. I recommended he get the system reinstalled by the person who built it for him originally. I don't even think having taken gnome-desktop-environment off of that system before the upgrade attempt would have helped but it's too late to go back and experiment now. Might there be any other things that I could do short of having a system reinstall that will break the upgrade jam? I can't even downgrade to lenny at least with the tools I know about.
