Normally I don't harbour much hate for Debian, but sometimes package
maintainers deserve a thwack over the head.
Removing lighttpd ...
Stopping web server: lighttpd failed!
invoke-rc.d: initscript lighttpd, action "stop" failed.
dpkg: error processing lighttpd (--remove):
subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit status 1
Starting web server: lighttpd.
Errors were encountered while processing:
lighttpd
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Now, duh, the reason you couldn't stop it was because it wasn't
running in the first place! (And the reason it wasn't running was
because of a configuration error, that quite frankly I didn't care
about because, well, I didn't care.)
Now my first answer would be to force it, except that usually doesn't
get you around scripts. Bah.
~patrick