Update to Slink ate itself

[Sean Hollingsworth <psu19881@odin.cc.pdx.edu>]

I recently had to reinstall Debian 2.0, and wanted to update back to
Slink.  I Dselected from Debian's ftp site, and installed, and .... got
the mother of all dselect error messages.  I thought, since I had had a
very intermittent connection, that perhaps some of the .debs might have
been corrupted, so I reinstalled and tried again.  And again when I went
to install the slink .debs, it ate itself.  From I what I could get out of
the (many) error messages, ncurses is the problem.  My system was so hosed
that I had to do a hard-reboot just to get out of linux.  Has anybody else
ran into this?  If this has already been brought up here, I apologize for
bringing it up again.