so some more information for anyone that might be able to help. I tried to do an apt-get upgrade to see if that would reinstall or upgrade any packages that weren't working. It fetched 6 various packages fine and then the following appeared:

/bin/sh: usr/sbin/dpkg-preconfigure: not found
dpkg: parse error, in file '/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 706 package 'liblzo1':
'Depends' field, reference to 'libc6': version contains ' '
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

so it looks like I don't have a dpkg-preconfigure anymore. Where can I get a new one?