I had to rebuild my machine (an ancient 750 Mhz AMD box with about half a gig of RAM) and used the Dapper CD I had handy, figuring once I got it installed, I could update the machine to something newer. The machine locked up during the updating and I had to reboot it. When I logged in and tried to resume the process I got error messages or the various apps I used to try and install the upgrades (or new programs) would promptly crash. The error messages I'm getting are:

A error occured, please run Package Manager from the right-click menu or apt-get on a terminal to see what is wrong. The error message was: 'Error: Opening the cache (E: Problem parsing dependency Depends, E:Error occurred while processing sound-juicer (NewVersion1). Eroblem with MergeList /var/lib/dpkg/status, E:The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.)'
So how do I fix all of this? Package manager will run, but I can't figure out to find and correct the problems with it, terminal will open, but I don't know the necessary commands to correct the problem. Update Manager will launch and then promptly crash. I've tried to install individual programs via package manager, but that doesn't work.