Comment 13 for bug 257639

I have packagekit installed. This is the situation in my case:

$ apt-config dump|grep Update
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Update "";
APT::Update::Post-Invoke-Success "";
APT::Update::Post-Invoke-Success:::: "touch /var/lib/apt/periodic/update-success-stamp 2>/dev/null || true";
APT::Update::Post-Invoke-Success:: "/usr/bin/dbus-send --system --dest=org.freedesktop.PackageKit --type=method_call /org/freedesktop/PackageKit org.freedesktop.PackageKit.StateHasChanged string:'cache-update'";

$ dpkg-query -W packagekit
packagekit 0.3.6-0ubuntu4

I have now removed packagekit and will see if the problem occurs again or not.

The difficulty is though the problem occurred with me only when there was some software to update, something which happened frequently while intrepid was in development, but now will happen less often.