What to do about [B]roken kde pkgs (as reported by aptitude)

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

I seem to have a rather high percentage of kde pkgs that are listed as
[B]roken by `aptitude'.  What can I do to fix that?
Just re-installing the pkgs seems to have no effect on the Broken
status.  

They nearly all seem to have the `[A]utomatic' flag too.  So I tried
removing the Automatic mark first and then re-installing but it made
no difference