Thanks Manuel, "aptitude (un)markauto" works now with version 0.7.8-1.
I've made another observation: all systems I administer are amd64, mainly multi-core, only one unicore machine with almost the same package list on these systems. Every multi-core machine has several ten "Auto-New-Install" entries in /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates, the unicore machine has none. Best regards, Jörg-Volker.
