tracked down more information on this problem: installation of gcc 3.3 causes installation of libstdc++5 causes libgcc1 to fail for all programs linked with gcc 3.2.
that means that i cannot use reportbug without downgrading back to gcc 3.2 which i cannot easily do because i now have packages on my system that depend on gcc 3.3: if i attempt to downgrade by removing unstable from the sources.list the problems caused by this "solution" become even worse than the please fix this one soon, for your own sanity and peace of mind to minimise the number of people who may end up in a similar nightmare situation. l. p.s. i cannot even use reportbug any more because reportbug relies on python2.2-optik which depends on python2.2 which depends on libstdc++5 which now conflicts with python2.2...