dselect broke when updating to potato

["Edward Di Geronimo Jr." <edigeron@stevens-tech.edu>]

Hi,

The other day I updated my system from slink to potato, and now dselect
and apt are broken. First off, if I go into dselect and choose Access,
Update, or Install, it exits out to the shell with the error:

dselect: unable to access method script
`/usr/lib/dpkg//methods/charset/setup': Not a directory

The other dselect choices work.

"apt-get update" works, however, "apt-get install" always says:

0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 11 not upgraded.

regardless of what I chose in dselect. I can't install or update anything
with apt right now. I can still install packages with dpkg -i. I tried
downloading a new version of the dpkg package a few minutes ago, however,
it didn't make a difference.

Any ideas how I can fix things?

Ed