Hi Doug; I would suggest that you do through the debian-user and debian-devel message archive lists (ie: on debian.org).
You have probably "been hit" by the "perl problem". An "apt-get upgrade" may or may not (at this point) bring things to a "sane" point. Those of us that are using "potato" in production machines are very careful about doing upgrades... same was true for hamm and slink. During various stages of the development an otherwise "stable" beta can suddenly break very badly (this is of course WHY they are called beta releases). Part of your problem is that because perl is so critical to the package management system, a change in perl can easily "break" your system in "strange ways". Even error messages can be quite misleading at such times. By reading through the great many postings about this subject you should be able to get a feel for the nature of your problems and hopefully either see the solution(s) yourself or at least be able to better focus your questions. Personally I probably can't help you beyond these suggestions because at this moment I do not have any "current beta" machines.
