Comment 26 for bug 414181

I am having an issue similar to this on 2 out of 3 systems running 10.10. The one system that is not having this issue is a fresh install, still running the stock window manager. Others are dist-upgrades running fluxbox. I apologize if I am posting this in the wrong place, I see that several people have reported different symptoms. Since my problem description is slightly different than some others, I'll run through what I see, comparatively.

- Install Updates is available, but does not install updates when clicked (like everyone else).
- No combination of clicking Check or Settings will make the Install Updates button function as expected.
- Prior to updating to 10.10, clicking Check or Settings, then Install Updates would usually work as expected.
- Checking or un-checking any number of packages to be updated has not shown any different response.
- The updates will install without error via command line; sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade
- Updates will also install without error via synaptic; click Mark All Upgrades, then click Apply.
- I get no errors from update-manager (either when running from terminal, or in .xsession-errors).
- Running sudo aptd -td in one terminal and clicking on Install Updates yields an info message like the following;

with only one package selected:
20:58:57 AptDaemon [INFO]: CommitPackages() was called: dbus.Array([dbus.String(u'')], signature=dbus.Signature('s')), dbus.Array([dbus.String(u'')], signature=dbus.Signature('s')), dbus.Array([dbus.String(u'')], signature=dbus.Signature('s')), dbus.Array([dbus.String(u'')], signature=dbus.Signature('s')), dbus.Array([dbus.String(u'ubuntu-docs')], signature=dbus.Signature('s'))

with several packages selected:
21:00:48 AptDaemon [INFO]: CommitPackages() was called: dbus.Array([dbus.String(u'')], signature=dbus.Signature('s')), dbus.Array([dbus.String(u'')], signature=dbus.Signature('s')), dbus.Array([dbus.String(u'')], signature=dbus.Signature('s')), dbus.Array([dbus.String(u'')], signature=dbus.Signature('s')), dbus.Array([dbus.String(u'icedtea-6-jre-cacao'), dbus.String(u'icedtea6-plugin'), dbus.String(u'libc-bin'), dbus.String(u'libc-dev-bin'), dbus.String(u'libc6'), dbus.String(u'libc6-dbg'), dbus.String(u'libc6-dev'), dbus.String(u'libc6-i386'), dbus.String(u'openjdk-6-jre'), dbus.String(u'openjdk-6-jre-headless'), dbus.String(u'openjdk-6-jre-lib'), dbus.String(u'ubuntu-docs')], signature=dbus.Signature('s'))

strace output from aptd between idle states is attached. And from update-manager (attached before pressing Install Updates, and killed shortly after returning to idle loop) will be attached to the next post.

Note: I have been quietly tolerating this issue for over a year as the workaround of clicking Check before Install Updates was trivial. Even at this point, having no such simple workaround, I spent several months doing updates from command line since I had previously been trained to work around issues with the update manager. I suspect that there are many more people affected by this bug who are similarly tolerating it following the mild introduction and gentle symptom ramp up.

If there are any suggestions for things to try, I would be happy to experiment. Or if any other specific information would be helpful, please let me know.