OK,I found a link (finally!) that helped with my problem:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=591910
I did the mv gnome-user-data.list to another name and tried an 'apt-get
purge gnome-user-data' and this time it was the list file for gnome-
terminal-data which was the offender with the empty filename.
So I tried to purge gnome-terminal-data and got yet another file. I
tracked back through 4 packages and had to move their *.list files. (I
assume that rm'ing them would have been equally as effective). Then
'apt-get install ...' on all of them plus any associated packages
mentioned that would uninstalled along with the one I specifically gave
on the purge command lines, just to make sure, though all reported that
they were already installed. After all that, UpdateManager then worked.
However, unlike the poster of that ubuntuforums article, I did not have
any garbled data. All the *.list files that I had to move were
syntacticly correct shell scripts, but since I don't know the Debian
package system at all (I'm a BSD person, only recently into Linux) I
don't know if they were logically correct.
What I don't get is that when I tried to download & (re)install gnome-
user-guide with Synaptic and with apt-get that the *.list file wasn't
nuked so that it would be recreated from the .deb. That way I would have
right away been give the error message with a *different* package name,
causing me to try and re-install that package, and so forth back through
the chain. That would have made things *so* much less frustrating.
--
Cannot do updates with synaptic, updatemanager or apt-get
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/159163
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