Had to force a restart of my machine BTW, and got a message on startup that fsck could not fix my usr partition and that I would have to do it manually. I ran fsck, which seemed to deal with a lot of problems, but finally finished. Then tried to run dselect, and the machine said it couldn't find it. Rebooted. Now it can find and run dselect, but this message shows up at the beginning of the install process:
dpkg : serious warning : files list file for package 'libc6-develop' missing. assuming package has no files currently installed. Can someone please explain what this means and if it means that I have to start over once again?! David Kachel