apt-get issues on potato

[Adam]

This is my 3rd box to install Debian on and each one had their own particular issues.  This box is my oldest.  I think it is revision 1 of the b/w G3 if not that then it is rev 2.  It is a 350mz with 650mb of ram and 2 internal hard drives.

I have installed most of potato I want to use on this install.  (This install is the 4th or 5th one each resulting in the same type of errors.)

After selecting the packages I want to install.. I get this error

apt-get install
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
50 packages not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used.
dpkg: parse error, in file `/var/lib/dpkg/available' near line 73278 package `plum':
user-defined field name `S' too short
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)


no matter what combo or apt-get I use.. it is all the same resutls.  Before the error with 'plum' there were other errors with other packages.  I don't want to have to reinstall again.

Thanks...
-Adam