Hi, Wally.

I suffered a similar difficulty, with the Application Manager refusing to install applications from over the network due to 'Operation aready in progress'. I also suffered a crashing web browser around that time. I wasn't in red-pill mode.

I had to shutdown and pull the battery for about a minute in order to eliminate the problem. A simple power cycle was not enough. I'm conjecturing that was because of a temporary filesystem that does not necessarily lose its state on a power cycle.

I analysed the filesystem for files related to apt and dpkg, and removed any that appeared to be locks or transient working files. For example, one of the the following two files gave me a clues as to when the 'already in process' condition became asserted on the filesystem.

/var/lib/dpkg/lock

/var/apt/cache/archives/lock

Using the date from one of the suspicious lock files (I can't recall which - my terminal history isn't deep enough for me to recover it), I further analysed the filesystem for files with the identical timestamp, using a command like the following and being careful to specify identical whitespace in the grep expression. (There's probably a more proper way to do this search, using find, but this worked.):

ls -lR / | grep "Aug 8 18:31"

That search indicated the presence of symbolic links pointing to named pipes related to apt on a temporary filesystem (I also cannot recall which one). I shutdown, pulled the battery for about a minute, rebooted, and voila, problem solved.

Norm.