apt-get failure: "no script in the new version of the package"

["Ron Hale-Evans" <ludism@gmail.com>]

I'm running a Knoppix 4.0 DVD distro installed to hard drive, and
recently apt has refused to update or install _anything_. I seem to
have some packages "halfway installed", or perhaps installed twice (as
it appears in synaptic), notably esound-common (I was tweaking my sound
packages a few weeks back).

Here is the script of a recent attempt:

root@focus:~# apt-get -f install
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
 esound-common
The following packages will be REMOVED:
 libwine libwine-print libwine-twain wine wine-utils winetools
The following packages will be upgraded:
 esound-common
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 6 to remove and 1894 not upgraded.
3 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B/38.2kB of archives.
After unpacking 11.2MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
(Reading database ... 358458 files and directories currently
installed.)
Preparing to replace esound-common 0.2.35-2.1 (using
.../esound-common_0.2.36-3_all.deb) ...
/usr/share/doc-base/esound-common: cannot open control file for
reading: No such file or directory
dpkg: warning - old pre-removal script returned error exit status 2
dpkg - trying script from the new package instead ...
dpkg: error processing
/var/cache/apt/archives/esound-common_0.2.36-3_all.deb (--unpack):
 there is no script in the new version of the package - giving up
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/esound-common_0.2.36-3_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I've tried a lot of things, including plenty of Googling, but it all
boils down to this. FWIW, fsck notices a few errors it can't fix on my
HD; I'll get to those soon by booting from the original Knoppix DVD.
The errors don't seem to be in /etc/apt or anything.

I'm almost at the point of reinstalling, but I really don't want to do
that. Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Ron Hale-Evans
rwhe@ludism.org