Strange events...

[Roberto Giorgetti <roberto.giorgetti@bancaimi.it>]

I am a little worried about my system (Debian stable on ULTRA 5).

I have been experiencing for about three months a corruption on file
/var/lib/dpkg/available. 

When I install/upgrade, apt-get stops saying that in this file at
line XXXXX there is a forbidden character (usually `) instead of the
normal character. 

Usually I solve the problem editing the file /var/lib/dpkg/available, 
going to that line and replacing the ` with the right character (guessing it!).

Yesterday running xview I received a "relocation problem". I purged and
re-installed xloadimage package to solve it.

Today I received the same "relocation problem" launching xterm. I purged
and re-installed xlibs package to solve it.

Now I wonder if:

-my system is going to die (the disk?);

-I have a worm/virus of some kind (the machine is connected to Internet
and works as firewall for my whole LAN with netfilter/iptables);

-it is a known problem.

Thank you very much in advance.

Roberto Giorgetti