[ale] In DEB/APT Hell Again

[JD]

Ok, I'm back again.  Back in dpkg hell seeking for some help.  The help
this weekend was exactly correct and I'm hoping for another win on a
different machine.

The normal 'apt-get update; apt-get upgrade' failed with lots and lots
of packages that needed to be updated. 8.04 Ubuntu Server x64.

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# apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run `apt-get -f install' to correct these.
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# aptitude clean

Worked.  The next apt-get -f install run re-downloaded all the needed
packages, then failed with an error (2) in dpkg.
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# apt-get -f install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  coreutils debianutils dhcp3-client dhcp3-common libapache2-mod-php5
  libfreetype6 libsysfs2 php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-gd php5-ldap
  php5-mysql sudo
Suggested packages:
  avahi-autoipd resolvconf php-pear libfreetype6-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  debianutils libfreetype6 libsysfs2 sudo
The following packages will be upgraded:
  coreutils dhcp3-client dhcp3-common libapache2-mod-php5 php5-cli
php5-common
  php5-curl php5-gd php5-ldap php5-mysql
10 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 11 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/9164kB of archives.
After this operation, 13.3MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Preconfiguring packages ...
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

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Ideas?  Google and Ubuntu forums haven't been helpful to a solution.