Sorry for the bumping...

It seems to me this is problem with the list of installed programs... especially seeing that in Settings/Applications/Manage applications the list of installed packages is empty. On my kubuntu machine I'd usually solve it with a 'sudo apt-get -f install' but this is not working... how can I reconfigure the package list? Even 'dpkg --reconfigure' isn't working (command not found, and I'm not sure I remember it exactly).