Well, here's what I was talking about on the IRC: First I installed hamm, then upgraded (by a mix of by hand and dpkg-ftp) to unstable (all this without installing X). Then I used apt to install X (the last release without xfree86-common, forgot which). I upgraded from release to release till -9 but didn't realise dselect (or maybe apt) chose not to purge xbase when I asked to, and they instead removed it (and the conffiles remained).
Due to some freak dpkg bug, xbase ended up with three conffiles (Branden says this is wrong). When I purged xbase, dpkg removed one of them, which in fact was from xfree86-common, messing up everything. BTW, one of the other conffiles was Xsession itself. It didn't get removed. I'm seriously starting to think dpkg is truly worse than I thought.
